How-to: Homemade Whipped Shea Hair and Body Butter
I have found the holy grail mix when it comes to hair and body butter and so I’m sharing it with you today. Raw shea butter is transformed into a luxurious, rich, creamy butter, perfect to use on your hair to seal in moisture or as a replacement for your store-bought lotion. The best part is the adaptability, you get to choose the scent and creaminess and control the ingredients.
Whipped Shea Butter For the Body
I start with all-natural shea butter and usually make two batches. Since I know now that coconut oil irritates my face, I separate the batches. I like them to be different consistencies anyway. For my body butter, I use shea butter, Olive Oil, Castor Oil, Argan Oil, Wheat Germ Oil, Coconut Oil, and then whatever essential oils I happen to have on hand for scent and added aromatherapy benefits. My favourite is a mix of sweet orange and lavender oils.
My last body butter batch also had grapeseed oil, jojoba oil and avocado oil. The mix is really up to you. I want my lotion to be a consistency that can be squeezed out of a bottle so I want a runnier consistency than my hair butter. Of course, if you like a thicker body butter kind of consistency you would use less oil. There’s no need for exact measurements, eyeball it and adjust to your taste. Here’s the ratio my lotion mix looked like before blending.
This is in my small magic bullet cup, let her rip! Once you’re done blending and you’ve bottled your mix, it will thicken up some as it settles so always try and get it just a little runnier than you’d want.
Using up my old lotion bottles.
Whipped Shea Butter For the Hair
My hair mix has pretty much the same ingredients with the exception of the coconut oil. I don’t want that to get onto my face as it causes me to break out so I leave it out. Cold-pressed, raw coconut oil is touted as great for skincare so don’t be afraid to try it out on your face or in your hair and see if it works for you. Everybody has a different experience but it’s a no-go above my neck, unless I am washing it out.
My hair butter went right back into this container. This is a 32oz container of shea butter that lasts me about 6 months. Give this a try! Even if you’re simply whipping the shea with coconut oil or olive oil, that in itself is a phenomenal healing, all-natural product that you made yourself.
This butter is luxurious, lasts all day and makes my skin feel so soft and supple. The benefits of shea butter include healing eczema, scars and stretch marks. I’m not sure about stretch marks but I can attest to eczema as munchkin’s skin patches are being kept at bay. I haven’t been using it on any areas that I have stretch marks but I simply love the way my legs feel after I rub down 😉 You could experiment with adding mango butter and cocoa butter to the mix as well.
The hair butter works better than anything I have ever put in munchkin’s hair as a moisture sealant. After I co-wash her hair, I add in a leave-in conditioner then some castor oil/coconut/olive oil mix to help seal and soften the hair and then this butter over all that. It keeps her hair soft and moisturized the entire time that I am combing her hair, whether doing plaits or cane rows.
I also use it in my hair after I’ve added my leave-in conditioner and my styling product. I concentrate it on my ends to help keep them super moisturized.
Are you convinced? Think you’ll be trying this out? Lemme know! Click here for a video I watched before I dived in, that inspired me to start making my own whipped shea butter. I’m so happy I did!
Related: My favourite DIY deep conditioner!
Love your experiments.
I can tell you that Shea makes your skin so soft. I had been using cocoa butter for many years because lotion did nothing for my dry skin. I switched to Shea for a year now. Love it!! I like to add Vitamin E oil to my Shea butter or I mix the Shea butter, cocoa butter and vitamin E.
I also add some bio oil to the mix when I have it. Way better than lotion. It keeps those knees and elbows moist when taking those pics!
@Sam, I think I’m gonna try the Vitamin E with the Shea Butter & maybe the orange oil that she mentioned
@Sam.. I mix with the bio oil as well.. At first it was just me THINKING I was gettign creative with my raw shea butter. I mean I bought it for my hair and realized in its raw state it would help my daughter’s eczema itch and then I had a bottle of bio oil lying around and tossed some of that in… The bio oil also gives it a nice lil fragrance.
I love it and it helps me a lot in making mine coz I’ve been thinking of a way to make the hair cream watery so that I can squeeze it out of a lotion bottle