Nourishing Shea Butter
I love how nature provides all of the things we need to support our body, including our skin. There’s no reason we need to use chemically altered, designed, or toxic products to have radiant, healthy skin; especially when you have shea butter. It’s chemical composition gives our skin what it needs to be hydrated, protected, and balanced.
- The fatty acids (oleic, stearic, linoleic, palmitic) help to balance the oils on your skin, without blocking the pores.
- Antioxidant vitamins A and E encourage healing and cell growth.
- Triglycerides melt into your skin on contact, absorbing quickly and completely to nourish the skin without leaving an oily residue.
- Wax esters protect the skin from moisture loss, so your skin stays soft and moisturized all day.
Experience the nourishing power of shea butter in my Rose & Frankincense Nourishing Moisturizer. It’s great for all skin types, but especially dry or mature skin.
Calming Shea Butter
As shea butter contains all the fatty acids that our skin needs, it makes sense that it can help calm reactive skin, but it goes a few steps further with its calming and healing effects. This is because shea butter is rich in linoleic acid, an effective anti-inflammatory. This is great news for people who suffer from inflammatory conditions such as eczema, dermatitis, and acne.
Research agrees, with small studies (such as these done in 2009 and 2015) showing an improvement in eczema symptoms after using shea butter compared to other creams. This soothing butter calms inflammation while nourishing the skin with healing nutrients, leaving healthier and less reactive skin behind.
Find calming relief in my gentle Shea & Starflower Calming Moisturizer, created for very sensitive, reactive, and damaged skin.
Shea Butter and the Sun
The amount of synthetic ingredients in commercial sunscreens has always scared me. Recently, a large number of spray-on sunscreens were found to have elevated levels of the carcinogen benzene. And as they are sprays, people were breathing in benzene as well as applying it to their skin. Terrifying! It’s ingredient lists and news articles like these that led me to develop my natural, protective Sun Creams.
My Sun Creams have several ingredients that make them feel amazing to use while they protect your skin from the sun’s damaging rays (read the Sun Cream FAQ’s), but I want to focus on shea butter today. This lovely butter found its way into the ingredient list for a few reasons:
- As an anti-inflammatory, it helps protect and heal the skin from sun damage.
- It melts beautifully into the skin, hydrating and locking in moisture on hot summer days. This meltability makes it the perfect carrier to apply the mineral sunscreen to the skin.
- It has a natural SPF. While shea butter alone likely won’t prevent a sunburn, it’s natural SPF qualities can work with other natural ingredientsto increase its sun protective abilities.
In the summer, I use my Sun Creams as a daily moisturizer and for chemical-free sun protection. See? Plants really can do it all.
The Shea Butter I Use
All of my ingredients are as pure as possible, and the organic, unrefined, cold-pressed shea butter I use is the same. That’s because refining processes that use heat and chemicals degrade or remove the plant’s therapeutic properties. Yes, it will still moisturize your skin, but without shea butter’s healing, anti-inflammatory and protective effects.
I also choose to purchase my ingredients ethically, to support the cultures and people who have relied on these ingredients for generations. My shea butter comes from Africa, where fairtrade has created good jobs and a better quality of life for many of the estimated three million women who work with shea.
Ready to incorporate shea butter into your skincare routine? Here are quick links to all my shea-containing products:
Shea & Starflower Calming Moisturizer
Rose & Frankincense Nourishing Moisturizer
Chamomile & Calendula Sun Cream
Lemongrass & Lavender Sun Cream
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