How To Make A Natural Body Butter That’s Perfect For Your Skin Type

 

 

Healthy, hydrated skin is everyone’s top priority, so why is the commercial beauty industry working so hard to make it practically unobtainable?

Sure, those prettily-packed lotions on drugstore shelves might look like they contain the nourishment your skin craves, but in truth, most are filled with fragrances and preservation agents that only aid in drying it out.

A better option? Skip those unnecessary ingredients and cut straight to the hydration by making and using natural body butter to moisturize your skin instead.

What Is A Body Butter?

As the name implies, natural body butters are nourishing skin products. Most plant-based butters are made from cold-pressed extracts of nuts, seeds, or beans, and they tend to melt directly into the skin.

Because they don’t contain water, body butters are significantly thicker than standard lotions. Their rich profile of fatty acids makes them solid at room temperature, meaning that they rarely require synthetic chemical preservatives like paraffin, parabens, propylene glycol or sodium lauryl sulfate to stay fresh.

Natural body butter is rarely made from just one ingredient, but instead is a blend of different extracts. The essential components of each butter are the minerals and oils that create a barrier on the skin to prevent it from losing its moisture content and drying out.

The texture of body butters can range from soft and whipped to semi-solid or even hard. It takes slightly more effort to massage body butter into the skin than a standard lotion, but they are significantly better at smoothing and softening skin to relieve dryness and irritation.

Benefits Of Natural Body Butters

Because of their naturally nourishing compounds, body butters are one of the best ways to hydrate your skin. Though most natural butters are odorless, some, like shea butter, have a mild, nutty scent. For this reason, most body butter recipes incorporate essential oils to add extra interest and some additional health properties to the cream.

Overall, body butters are meant to be applied directly to trouble spots to heal skin and promote hair health. They can address rashes, wrinkles, chronic dryness, blemishes, wound healing, cracking, inflammation, general irritation, and more. For instance many pregnant women swear by using natural body butter as a solution for stretch marks, and the butter’s highly concentrated ingredients work well to combat cuticle problems as well.

Natural butters also work well to restore hair health. Light butters often provide faster absorption without a greasy residue, making them ideal for hydrating hair. In contrast, thicker, creamier butters work best to treat severely dry skin.

10 Best Ingredients For Natural Body Butters

While there are dozens of potential ingredients available for whipping up a batch of homemade body butter, some oils offer significantly more benefits than others.

It’s perfectly fine to stick to standard ingredients like coconut butter for your first few batches, but don’t be afraid to experiment with some of the lesser-known but equally potent options like cupuacu or kokum oil as well.

Below are some of the best natural butter varieties to stock up on for homemade skin products.

1. Almond Oil

Sweet almond oil creates a thick, creamy butter filled with fatty acids and vitamin D that can soften and hydrate skin. The oil’s high viscosity and smooth texture make it easy to spread, and a stellar ingredient in balms and body butters for all skin types.

2. Avocado Butter

Avocado butter contains ample amounts of vitamins A, B, and E, making it a potent hydration asset for dull hair and severely dry skin. The butter comes from the avocado seed, and there is evidence that it is naturally resistant to UV rays. This means that wearing avocado oil body butter might lower your risk of sunburn.

3. Cocoa Butter

As one of the most shelf-stable fats, cocoa butter is flush with natural antioxidants and can last for years without spoiling. Though the light scent won’t remind you of chocolate, the butter is a reliable option thickening cosmetic products and is useful for pregnant women looking to avoid stretch marks. Oily-skinned people should take note though, this butter’s high moisture content means it might be best avoided.

4. Coconut Oil

Thanks to its low melting point, coconut oil is almost a liquid at room temperature, making it all but effortless to massage into your skin. This tropically-scented oil works well as an acne spot treatment or all-over moisturizer. Make sure you source a variety that is organic, unrefined, and cold pressed to ensure that the classic coconut scent and silky texture isn’t compromised in the manufacturing process.

5. Cupuacu Butter

This naturally hard butter comes from the Brazilian cupuacu tree, and it makes an ideal ingredient for homemade hair and skin products. High phytosterol levels mean that this natural butter has an impressive water absorption capacity and can act as a natural alternative to lanolin. But those with extra oily skin beware; capuacu butter might be too rich for your skin texture.

6. Grapeseed Oil

Rich in vitamins C and E as well as beta-carotene, grapeseed oil contains exactly what your skin needs to soften up. When added to body butter recipes, grapeseed oil improves their spreadability and ensures that it can quickly absorb into the skin.

7. Jojoba Butter

Jojoba butter is useful for treating eczema and psoriasis, as well as a variety of other skin conditions. Its creamy texture makes it similar in structure to human sebum, making it ideal for addressing problems in excessively oily skin.

8. Kokum Butter

Despite its hard appearance, kokum butter is valued for producing soft and supple skin without leaving a greasy residue. This off white butter is extracted from the seeds of the Indian kokum tree, and its dense texture makes it ideal for firming up body butter and other cosmetic products. Kokum butter is especially useful for healing skin damaged from sunburns.

9. Mango Butter

Flush with antioxidants and emollients, mango butter works to soften and moisturize dry skin. Though solid at room temperature, the oil quickly softens when exposed to body heat, making it easy to absorb directly into your skin. Because it is unscented and less dense than many other natural butters, mango butter is an excellent option for those who want something slightly less rich for their skin.

10. Olive Butter

Olive oil and olive butter alike contain impressive levels of vitamins, fatty acids, and a potent blend of antioxidants that make them ideal for hydrating and softening skin. Because most body butters work best when they are composed of roughly a quarter liquid ingredients, olive oil is popular for improving a body butter’s spreadability.

How To Make A Body Butter?

Now let’s look into the detailed steps required when learning how to make a body butter.

How To Make Simple Body Butter With The First Basic Formula?

Step 1:

In a suitable vessel preferably a glass beaker or a suitable jar add the approximately weighed amounts of Shea butter and coconut oil.

Though shea butter and coconut oil will have different melting and boiling points it is safe to add them together. Now place the beaker or jar in a double boiler. You can use a thicker vessel like a sauce pan filled half with water and place it on medium heat.

Now with constant gentle stirring melt the shea butter and allow it to blend with the coconut oil. Since the heating phase is really short, there is no damage in heating Shea butter with other solid fats and butters or oils.

Step 2:

After this blend is melted, stop heating and add the almond oil and blend gently.

Step 3:

Continue gentle blending as the blend cools down. At about 35 degrees Centigrade. Add the essential oil.

Step 4:

As the butter cools down, the viscosity increases. Continue stirring until the butter reaches a consistency where you can make traces with your spatula. This is the consistency of our butter.

At this point pour the butter into the jar and place it in the fridge and allow it to cool down simultaneously. This reduces the chances of the shea butter forming crystals and giving grittiness to the product.

Now, if you want your butter to look fluffy and attractive you can make a whipped butter.

How To Make A Whipped Body Butter?

Step 1:

With the butter in the step 4 in the previous method where you had it in the fridge on cooling for 40 to 50 mins remove the jar and check if the butter is soft to touch.

Step 2:

Now with a good hand blender whip up the butter till it forms peaks in the similar manner as you whip the cream for your desserts.

Step 3:

Place this back in the fridge and allow it to set.

Leave both butters for some 12-24 hours in the fridge. After that, take them out and leave them at ambient temperature. Compare their appearance, texture and skin feel after another 24-48 hours.

A variation that can be used for the body butter is to replace the basic coconut oil or almond oil with an oil infusion. An oil infusion can be made with a lot of spices like Cinnamon, clove buds, cardamom or lemon grass with a carrier oil like avocado oil and adding this infusion for added fragrance and effect.

Some Bottlenecks To Look For:

• It’s really important to allow the body butter to set in the fridge, otherwise it won’t whip. We’ve found it’s ready to whip when you can stick your finger in the middle and it will hold the indentation. However, if you accidentally forget about your body butter in the fridge or freezer and it gets too hard, all is not lost. Simply allow it to thaw at room temperature until it reaches the proper consistency.

• You can easily store your whipped body butter at room temperature. However, if your house is very warm, it may melt. But if this happens, you can simply re-whip and you’ll be good to go.

• Want unscented body butter? No problem! The essential oils are completely optional.

• My favorite essential oils for this recipe are Bergamot, Frankincense, Geranium, Wild Orange, Lavender, Ylang-Ylang, rose oil, Peppermint–especially peppermint combined with the white chocolate body butter recipe.

Some Tips To Follow When Using Body Butter

Now we are well aware of the fact that the body butters have various qualities which are beneficial for the skin.

Another great quality of all body butters is that they are easy-to-use and serve many purposes. You can also follow some of these variations in your formula to achieve the best possible product to fulfill your personal skin goals!

1. If you’re looking to wash away all the tensions of the daily grind and looking forward to relax, try a body butter infused with lavender essential oil.

This type of body butter can give the benefits of aroma therapy and help relax your senses while you drift off to sleep and deeply moisturize your skin overnight.

2. One must always make it a point to use body butter immediately after you shower to allow it to penetrate the skin when it is soft and supple right after the shower. This will help deeply moisturize your skin and prevent moisture loss.
3. If you shave, applying body butter to your skin afterward so that it can heal the roughened skin and can also help moisturize your skin and prevent dryness.
4. If you are the one who is troubled with extreme dry skin conditions and are facing dryness more commonly in areas like the elbows, knees, and ankles—regularly apply body butter to these areas. This can help to improve your skin’s texture and prevent future dryness.

Are you pregnant? That is good news. Do not worry about possible stretch marks. Regularly apply body butter to keep your skin moisturized and reduce the chances of itching or stretch marks throughout your pregnancy.

How Long Can I Store This Body Butter? What Will Be Its Shelf Life?

Let us now find solutions to these niggling questions. Though they may sound irritating they are very important to be left unanswered.

It is kind of difficult to predict the shelf life of these formulations but one can easily use it for around 3 months or more if stored properly. By this we mean

Keep it in a cool, dark place (like in a cupboard).

For extra safety, you can store this in the fridge.

Keep in mind that, because it’s made of oil and doesn’t contain any added ingredients, it is susceptible to melting if left out in the heat (just as coconut oil turns from a solid into a liquid when heated). So do try to keep it at room temperature or below if possible.