Natural Skin and Body Care

Shea butter saved my daughter’s skin!!! This is not an exaggeration. As I wrote in my first post, my daughter suffered terribly from eczema. I suffered along with her, especially when I would see the scratches caused by her nails as she scratched her seemingly always itchy legs. It was terrible until I found out about shea butter and began mixing it with other oils to create a mixture that would soothe her skin.

In my experience as a bath and body products maker, there are two types of shea butter, refined and unrefined shea butter. To the inexperienced consumer, refined shea butter may be the best way to go, as its white color and odorless quality may be easier to blend with different fragrance/essential oils and colors. However, to be a well informed consumer and to truly get the skin benefits of shea butter is to know exactly how refined shea butter is made and how this process can detract from its skin benefits.

Refined shea butter is pure white and has no odor. Most makers of refined shea butter use hexane or other chemicals to strip the unrefined shea butter of its color and slight nutty/earthy fragrance. Through the refining process, the hexane also removes much of the healing components of the unrefined shea butter. While the white color and neutral odor of the refined shea butter may be appealing, remember that many of the moisturizing qualities and skin nutrients may be lacking. Refined shea butter may also be harder to the touch than unrefined shea butter and depending on where one purchases the shea, may be “grainy’ or have small granules. This is not to say that the refined shea butter is not suitable for use in many applications – often this type of shea butter is preferred when one wants the label appeal of shea butter without the variation in appearance and/or odor, which can occur with unrefined shea butter.

Unrefined Shea butter

Unrefined shea butter is extracted from the seed of the karite tree by boiling the opened shea nuts, which releases the shea butter from the meat. Then the shea butter is usually hand kneaded until it reaches the desired consistency. Though this process can take much longer than the hexane extraction process, the result is a creamier product that retains the nutritive essence of the shea nut.

Unrefined Shea butter is the preferred raw ingredient. It contains the natural Vitamin A and E as well as many antioxidants which are not found in refined shea. Unrefined shea butter is said to help heal wounds, sooth sunburn, prevent and/or lessen the appearance of stretch marks and to lessen the appearance of wrinkles. Unrefined Shea butter is also said to have many natural qualities that help skin cell regeneration and capillary circulation. My grandmother claims that that unrefined shea butter can help eased her arthritis pain! On top of it all, shea butter is an excellent skin moisturizer.

Our products use only unrefined shea butter for its skin-nutritive properties.

Welcome! If you’re reading this, it means you made it to my new blog for sheaproducts.info, a website owned and operated by neosoul.essentials, llc. The first thing I’d like to do is to welcome you to my business blog (which is finally hooked up to my selling site) and to give you a little insight into how I got started in the natural bath and body business.

I’ve always taken a holistic approach to life, even before it was cool to be “green”. I hated taking excess medications and never kept a whole bunch of remedies, i.e. antacid tablets, Alka-Seltzer, cough medicine and the like. I felt that these things only treated the symptoms, not the underlying causes of the problem. It also helped that my mother was a nurse with a firm belief in “riding it out” and was aware of the many side effects of medications that doctors sometimes prescribed so freely.

When I had my own children, I realized how doctors, either because they received perks from the drug companies, or they were trying to alleviate a parent’s worry, would prescribe medications for babies and toddlers that (to me) seemed too strong. However, I was a smart enough parent to use the doctor’s knowledge, my knowledge and my intuition to create a solution that worked for me and my children.

My daughter developed bleeding eczema when she was about 10 months old. Although she was my second child and had been through the alarms and “scares’ as a new parent with my first born, this was something totally new for me. Thinking it was because she was introduced to cow’s milk too soon, I immediately took her off the cow’s milk and began giving her soy milk. That didn’t work because she reacted badly to the soy milk. Next was rice milk with coconut oil and finally, goat’s milk. Her eczema stopped bleeding, but was still raw and irritated.

As she grew older and the eczema began appearing in cycles, I approached her doctor on how to control the itching. I was told to use Vaseline and/or hydrocortisone cream. I didn’t have such a problem with Vaseline, besides the fact that it didn’t really help heal, but was dead set against the hydrocortisone cream because I’d read it thins the skin. So, I began intensive research about other oils and/or butters that would protect and heal irritated skin. That’s when I discovered shea butter! And, you know, it was all good from there. I created balms that were a mixture of shea butter, cocoa butter, and different oils that really helped my daughter’s skin heal so well that at three, she only has the slight scarring of eczema on her legs.

So, that’s how I got started! I’ve enjoyed my natural product journey and look forward to creating more products for your use.

Currently I am offering whipped shea butter, which contains unrefined shea butter and organic soybean oil, as well as my signature megamix whip, which is a great combination of shea butter, hemp seed oil, organic virgin coconut oil and organic soybean oil Both products are simply wonderful for the skin.