Whipped Body Butters

Whipped body butters, also referred to as karite, which means “life” has been used across the African continent for centuries. It hails from Central and Western Africa. It’s actually a nut fat, as it’s obtained from the fruit of the kernel. Shea nuts are picked by women, then par-boiled, and sun-dried for a week in order to dehydrate the nut. This increases their storage time. The next step is to crush the dried fruit, in order to remove the skin. When the body butters is hand crushed like this, it retains all its numerous vitamins and minerals and the nutty, smoky scent is naturally preserved. The color ranges from off white to gray to golden brown to green, depending upon the maturity of the nut. It’s always refined at least once, in order to remove dirt, bits of gourd, or leaves, objects that would not be fun to apply to your skin.

In Africa, body butters is often used as a cooking oil. body butters can also be used as a hair conditioner, as a way to prevent sunburn pain, to soothe cracked, dry feet and hands, especially during those skin-drying winter months or for those of you who live in a dry climate. According to noted soapmaker/author Susan Miller Cavitch, in her 1995 book The Natural Soap Book, writes: “body butters is gentle enough for babies and people with sensitive skin. It soothes and softens dry chapped skin, while nourishing all skin types. I have come to rely heavily upon body butters for its effectiveness.” She was using this wonderful substance, and including it in her homemade soaps, long before most people in North America had even heard of body butters!

The texture of this life giving butter is smooth and creamy. However, since the early part of this century, a new way to make body butters even more luxurious and soft is to blend it with high quality plant and seed oils in order to create a whipped cream like texture which glides onto your skin. Whipped body butters can be made by those who know which combinations of oils and body butters can be whipped together to create that natural moisturizer your skin needs and yet not be too heavy/greasy. Properly made whipped body butters is light, creamy and fluffy and resembles Cool Whip yet doesn’t need to be refrigerated.

Google’s search engine returned only 80 matches for whipped body butters. Nowadays, it’s over 2000! However, for those of you unfamiliar with this wonderful product, whipped body butters is always 100% natural, containing only body butters and vegetable/plant/seed oils and an antioxidant such as vitamin E. It can be found unscented or with added fragrances/essential oils. Whipped body butters doesn’t have any type of wax, water, preservatives, or petroleum/mineral oils. Whipped body butters is always light, creamy and fluffy, making it easily absorbed into your skin.

This is one of the most versatile products available as it can be used as a hair conditioner, makeup remover, all-over moisturizer, softens cuticles, and always soothes dry or chapped skin. Lighter in weight than plain body butters, whipped body butters is a sumptuous yet economical way to pamper the body’s largest organ – your skin.

This has been successfully used for thousands of years to moisturize, heal and condition the skin. With body butters, especially the unrefined certified organic form, there are a couple of things that you can do to make sure that you are keeping the product fresh.

First of all, you want to make sure that the product comes to you fresh. Unrefined, organic body butters does have a smell. You may think that whipped body butters is not supposed to smell like anything, but it is. Refined body butters has been chemically heated to remove the odor, but it also removes most or all of the healing powers as well.

The purest unrefined forms of body butters are yellow to gold color, and may have a greenish tint. It smells earthy, like nuts. This comes from the natural smell of the Shea nut, and the roasting process it goes through in order for the body butters to be extracted. It does not smell bad. If your body butters product smells bad, chances are it is old and has gone rancid.

Keep your whipped body butters product at room temperature. You don’t want to leave it at extremely warm temperatures because this can cause it to go rancid. You should be just fine if you keep it in your bathroom or bedroom, as long as you keep the lid tightly closed. You also want to make sure that it comes to you in an opaque container. This means that the container is impenetrable by light. Light can break down the body butters, and degrade the healing properties.

As we mentioned before make sure that you keep the container lid on tight. If the body butters is exposed to air for a long period of time, auto-oxidation will occur. This is the chief cause of product break down, and you won’t want to use products that aren’t fresh. Making sure of all of these things will help keep your organic, unrefined body butters fresh and ready for your use. Whipped body butters is a truly amazing gift that Mother Nature has given us. Make sure yours stays fresh so it will provide maximum healing for oyur skin every time you use it.