Effect Of Raw Papain On Skin

Papain
Papain is a white colored latex that oozes out of the papaya when scratched, or when the plant is injured. There are many uses of papain, raw or processed. For the food industries, it's used as meat tenderizer. The enzyme helps to break down the tough bands between fibers in muscle tissue, making tough meats fall apart during the cooking process. For medicinal, (oral) it's used to aid digestion digestion problems, diarrhea, hay fever, runny nose, psoriasis. Treating infected wounds such as sores, ulcers, intestinal worms, or scars.

My experience with raw papain is when I have to help out to harvest our papaya. As we are short on labor. As we process our harvest in batch, when comes harvesting day, it's a full day process. Harvesting the papaya and post harvesting processing and grading.

During harvesting I had to pluck the papayas from tree to tree and place them into the wheel barrow. At times when there are more than 3 papayas, I tend to stack them on my arms and belly. This papain kind of  drip and come into contact with my shirt. As more and more papain comes into contact, and soaked into my shirt, it creates something like a patch and soaked into my skin ( raw papain overdosed). This is made worst by heat of the sun and sweat.

These caused irritation and blisters on my skin. I even washed the blister during lunch break on mid day. It was very painful when it comes into contact with water.
At the end of the day, after taking a bath which I had also clean the affected areas carefully (still very painful), I started to apply burn relief cream and moisturizing lotion. I always have some Johnson baby lotion at hand in my room.
The affected area gradually dried and healed. I'm sure that it shall be fully healed in a couple of days.

While washing the papayas, I always feel that the outer layer of my palm (epidermis) gets wash off as well. It kind of remove all the dead cell and make my palm smooth. This is doesn't create blister as it's diluted with water and I always change the water (overflow). Maybe next time I'll soak my feet in it to remove the dead cells :-)

This also start to make me curious on how to make papaya soap. Maybe I can try it out one day.
 How to make your own Papaya & Cucumber soap.


Looks easy enough.