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Butters

Murumuru Butter

INCI Astrocaryum Murumuru Seed Butter. Also: Astrocaryum Murumuru Seed Butter.

Calculate a 100 % Murumuru Butter bar

Published values

Saponification value200–210 mg KOH/g (typ. 205)
Used by the calculator205.0 mg KOH/g (typical)
SAP for NaOH0.1461 g/g
Iodine value11–19.6 g I₂/100 g
INS (SAP − IV)190
Melting point31–33 °C (typ. 32)
Unsaponifiable matter

A bar made of 100 % Murumuru Butter

Hardness 94 above 29–54
Cleansing 91 above 12–22
Conditioning 4 below 44–69
Bubbly lather 91 above 14–46
Creamy lather 3 below 16–48

Conventional qualities summed from the fatty-acid groups; a single-oil bar is a reference point, not a recipe.

These two published numbers disagree. The saponification value on record is 205.0 mg KOH/g, but the fatty-acid profile below implies about 248 — a gap of 17 %. The two are not independent facts: chain length fixes the molar mass, which fixes how much lye a gram of fat consumes. So one of the two fields is wrong, or they were measured on samples that are not comparable, and the disagreement is upstream in the literature rather than in the arithmetic here.

The calculator uses the published value, because that is what the source says. If you are building a recipe with a lot of this ingredient, weigh the risk: at 17 % it would shift your lye by roughly that much for the portion of the batch it makes up. A certificate of analysis for your own lot settles it. The notes below record which documents were checked.

Fatty-acid profile

Fatty acidPublished range, %Used
Lauric acid C12:0 · saturated 62.97–65.55 (typ. 64.26) 64.3
Myristic acid C14:0 · saturated 26.04–27.1 (typ. 26.57) 26.6
Palmitic acid C16:0 · saturated 3.33–3.45 (typ. 3.39) 3.4
Oleic acid C18:1 3.13–3.25 (typ. 3.19) 3.2
Linoleic acid C18:2 1.2–1.24 (typ. 1.22) 1.2

Where these numbers come from

Biomolecules (MDPI)Lozano-Garzon K, Orduz-Diaz LL, Guerrero-Perilla C, Quintero-Mendoza W, Carrillo MP, Cardona-Jaramillo JEC. "Comprehensive Characterization of Oils and Fats of Six Species from the Colombian Amazon Region with Industrial Potential." Biomolecules 13(6):985. · document dated 2023-06-13 · read 2026-09-21

Table 1 (saponification value, modified USP titration method) and Table 2 (fatty acid composition, GC) for Astrocaryum murumuru; iodine value also Table 1. All directly measured by this study, one of six Amazon species characterized.

Revista de Ciencias Farmaceuticas Basica e Aplicada (UFOPA)Feitosa JM, Silva TSA, Xavier AEF, Rodrigues WCS, Silva ACE, Correa CVP, Aguiar FS, Mourao RHV, Oliveira EG, Nunes KM. "Evaluation of the quality of Amazonian butters as sustainable raw materials for applications in bioproducts." Rev Cienc Farm Basica Apl. 2021;42:e708. DOI 10.4322/2179-443X.0708. · document dated 2021 · read 2026-09-21

Table 2 (acidity/SAP/iodine/peroxide indexes, directly titrated) and Table 3 (fatty acid profile, GC-MS) for a second, independent commercial murumuru butter lot; also gives directly-measured melting point (32C). Open-access PDF read in full.

Amazon Oil (producer)Murumuru Butter (Astrocaryum muru-muru) technical/product page · read 2026-09-21

Producer page states melting point 33C and lists lauric/myristic/oleic acids present (no percentages); no SAP/iodine/full fatty-acid table given on this page.

SAP is Lozano-Garzon et al. 2023 (PMC10295824, Biomolecules), Table 1, directly measured by a modified USP titration protocol: 205 +/- 4.70 mg KOH/g (range here is mean +/- SD). A SECOND primary source, Feitosa et al. 2021 (Rev Cienc Farm Basica Apl, open access, read in full as a PDF), measured 573.55 +/- 0.03 mg KOH/g for a different commercial murumuru lot - chemically implausible for a lauric/myristic-dominant fat (trilaurin's theoretical max is ~344 mg KOH/g) and explicitly flagged by that paper's OWN authors as inconsistent with the Brazilian Pharmacopoeia's expected 200-300 mg KOH/g range for this class of butter; excluded from the range here as a likely quality/measurement outlier in that specific sample, not used. Iodine value range combines both primary sources' own direct titrations: Lozano-Garzon et al. 2023 measured 19.10 +/- 0.47 g I2/100g; Feitosa et al. 2021 measured 11.49 +/- 0.29 g I2/100g for their lot - both plausible, real spread across commercial lots. Fatty acid profile uses ONLY Lozano-Garzon et al. 2023's single coherent GC profile (Table 2, mean +/- SD converted to min/max) to keep the object internally consistent. Feitosa et al. 2021's OWN measured profile for their lot was substantially different - lauric 40.00%, myristic 29.30%, palmitic 8.90%, oleic 11.40%, linoleic 3.90%, stearic 5.60%, arachidic (their label: eicosanoic, C20:0) 0.61%, behenic 0.16% - illustrating real lot-to-lot variability in commercial murumuru butter; not merged into the ranges above to avoid constructing a fatty-acid profile that doesn't correspond to any single real sample. Melting point combines Feitosa et al. 2021's measured 32 +/- 0.58C with Amazon Oil's (producer) stated 33C. Unsaponifiable matter: not reported in either Lozano-Garzon et al. 2023 or Feitosa et al. 2021, and not given on Amazon Oil's murumuru product page - left null, no allowed source located.

This record is part of the open ingredient database (ODbL). Found an error or a better primary source? The dataset is on GitHub; corrections with a document link are welcome.