Shea Butter: Beauty favorite for face and body

What is shea butter?

You can find many varieties of shea butter products on the shelves. This super butter for face and body care, also known as karité butter or more rarely galam butter, is obtained from the nut kernels of the shea tree . This tree grows up to a stately 12 meters high in the African savannah.

If you want to buy a product with a high content of shea butter - the ingredient is called Butyrospermum Parkii Butter on the INCI list after the botanical name of the tree - you quickly realize that this ingredient comes at a price. One of the reasons for this is that the trees only deliver their yield after a good 40 years.

What ingredients make shea butter so special?

The nuts have a very high fat content of around 45%, which is made up of several valuable lipids and has other positive properties:

• Stearic and palmitic acid has a shielding effect and offers your skin protection from external influences such as wind and cold .
• Oleic acid makes your skin feel nice and soft .
• Linoleic acid has a smoothing effect, plays an important role in the regeneration of your skin and makes it resistant.

☝️So if you want to fight dry and scaly skin in winter or simply need protection from wind and weather: Shea butter is the first choice here.

Can I use pure shea butter on my face and body?

As you can see, shea butter has a lot of positive properties. Why not use pure shea butter? You know, we are big fans of minimalism and of course we asked ourselves this question. However, pure shea butter is very greasy, firm and crumbly - unfortunately it is not so well suited for pure use . It is difficult to spread them on the skin because their melting point is only around 32°C.

Processed as the main ingredient in a balm or a cream, precisely these properties – in a weakened form – can be used to advantage: because shea butter provides long-lasting care and penetrates deeply into the skin. It makes sense to take the heaviness out of shea butter by combining it with light vegetable oils that have a lower melting point. This is exactly how we developed our FIVE Shea Cream .

Origin of our shea butter

Our COSMOS-certified shea butter comes from Burkina Faso and Ghana. The nuts are usually harvested by women who work together in local cooperatives . As a result of the merger, the women not only get fair purchase prices , but also have better tools at their disposal. Their work secures a large part of the livelihood of their families, enables them to receive medical care and pays their children's school fees. This makes shea processing a very important local industry . Our supplier knows the women personally and guarantees the cooperatives fair purchase prices.

Production of our shea butter

We only use pure Butyrospermum Parkii butter grown in certified organic areas. Extraction is complex with many work steps : the nuts collected in the wild are freed from their soft green shell and boiled in water. The nuts are then dried in the sun. As soon as they are dry, the second layer, the hard nutshell, comes off. The nuts are sorted out and further dried in the sun until they are ready for further processing. Now it's time to get down to business: after all, the nuts should ultimately be turned into butter. The nuts are ground, roasted and pressed. The result is unrefined shea butter as it is offered on the market.

The unrefined shea butter is perfect in its ingredients. In particular, the proportion of unsaponifiables, i.e. the phytosterols (which stabilize the skin’s barrier function) is higher in unrefined butter than in refined butter. However, the fact of the matter is that unrefined shea butter looks unappealing and, shall we say, smells something that takes some getting used to. It's really only for die-hards. That's why we opted for the sophisticated variant . After all, you should also enjoy a fragrant care ritual with natural cosmetics.

The production of the refined shea butter does not differ in the basic production, but it is additionally cleaned, filtered and brightened. Since our butter is COSMOS-certified, only additives that are permitted in the organic regulation , such as citric acid, fuller's earth and activated carbon, are used in this process. The auxiliary substances do not remain in the product, the result is 100% pure shea butter.

Is FIVE Shea Cream suitable for my skin?

You will especially like the balm if you would describe your skin as dry or even suffer from very dry skin . Most of our customers use the balm on their face , but the FIVE Shea Cream is also very suitable for heavily used hands, for example after gardening or for rough parts of the body.

Particularly noteworthy is the use of Shea Cream in the cold season to protect against wind and cold, for example when skiing or simply being outdoors. Then you can apply it a little thicker and even normal skin will enjoy rich and protective care in winter. Find out more in my article Versatile cold balm: How Shea Cream protects you in winter .