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Understanding Body Butters
Our customers love our handmade, small-batch body butters and so do we! Why would someone use a body butter instead of a lotion you may ask? Most importantly, in our opinion, a body butter can be made with 100% natural ingredients and will provide skin penetrating, lasting moisture. Let’s discuss what goes into our body butters that makes them so great for your skin...
Shea and Mango Butters
Shea butter is extracted from the nut of the African shea tree and mango butter is expressed from the kernel of the mango fruit. We love to add these to our body butters because they are so rich in vitamins, minerals, anti-oxidants and fatty acids. These components rejuvenate and hydrate the skin and are especially beneficial for those who suffer from extremely dry skin. Also, these butters are solid at room temperature so they are perfect to use in body butter recipes that do not contain beeswax.
Pure Vegetable Oils
There are many benefits to using natural body products that contain pure vegetable oils. Each oil has its own special list of vitamins, minerals and anti-oxidants that it can add to a body butter formulation, but equally important are questions like...Will it absorb into the skin and if so, how quickly? What kind of "feel" will it leave on the skin? How emollient is it? Does it have an overpowering scent? etc... Which oils are used will therefore depend on which components and properties are desired. Some of our favorite oils to add to body butters are olive, avocado, sweet almond and coconut.
Vitamin E
Many people believe that vitamin E is a preservative, and do-it-yourselfers will often mistakenly use it for this purpose. It is actually an anti-oxidant that can help prolong the shelf-life of a natural product. In skin care, Vitamin E helps to protect the skin from free radical damage, which is often responsible for premature aging.
Tapioca Starch
Lastly, to ensure that our body butters are not greasy when applied to the skin, we swear by tapioca starch in our formulations. We've found that it also helps to stabilize and thicken our body butters without having to use beeswax.