Whipped Shea Butter with Lavender and Orange
This is a pretty simple whipped Shea butter. I used refined organic Shea that had been pre-tempered. Shea comes in different consistencies and viscosities. The one I used was very soft at room temperature which allowed me to whip it and without it hardening later on. Other shea butters can be nearly as hard as mango butter, in which case you would need to melt it with some liquid oil to get the right consistency.
This should last a few years as over 90% of it is shea butter.
How does it feel?
It is very occlusive and when I made it initially it felt quite greasy so I added some organic tapioca starch to cut the oiliness a little. I didn't want to dry it out completely as that would be pointless. In my opinion it sinks into the skin quite quickly for what it is. Below is the formulation and method. Its scented with organic Orange and Lavender essential oils. As this is a leave on product it is better to use distilled Orange oil as I understand it is not phototoxic.
The formulation
INGREDIENT AMOUNT PERCENTAGE Organic Shea Butter 150.00g 93.750 Organic Tapioca Starch 009.00g 05.620 Organic Orange Essential Oil 000.50g 00.315 Organic Lavender Essential Oil 000.50g 00.315
Partially melt the Shea Butter. Mine was half melted when I decided to whisk. After the inital whisk the temperature was 29c. I then added the Tapioca Starch and essential oils. I whipped every 10 minutes. This is what it looked like when it was 27c3. I carried on whipping, every 5-10 minutes. This is the final picture after I whipped it at 23c.
I initially used the 'add ingredients as I go along' method of formulating and calculated the percentages afterwards. You might want to just use this as a basic guideline and adjust accordingly especially if you like things a bit neater. This is a good starter, but you could easily swap out the tapioca starch for another starch and of course use different essential oil blends. You could probably get away with softening it slightly in a bowl of hot water rather than melting it. Many people swear by using this method or continually stirring to stop it going grainy. This shea butter has a really nice consistency. It’s not extremely hard and quite easy to whip. It’s very moisturising and many people use it on its own for dry and itchy skin conditions. Whipping it is a great way to make it user friendly as it is quite dense otherwise. If you have problems with grainy Shea or want to know how to do all sorts of different things with it then you will find the book Working with Shea by Lise Andersen very useful.