You can tell if what you have is pure Shea Butter by its aroma and color. The color of pure Shea Butter and its aroma can sometimes be unappealing to individual consumers, which prompted a refining process to strip it of the original color and odor.

There are two forms of Shea Butter: refined and unrefined Shea Butter. The refined Shea Butter loses its aroma and color of pure Shea Butter as it goes through the manufacturing process, which includes adding a chemical called hexane. This is a petroleum-based chemical, which is thought to be harmful to people, the environment and other living things. Most consumers prefer unrefined Shea Butter.

Their Distinctive Characteristics

The color of pure Shea Butter may be a slightly greenish or cream colored. It varies from these two colors but is seldom far from either one. It looks very rich and fatty but does not feel greasy after a few minutes of rubbing onto the skin.

The Shea Butter color can be an indication of how it was produced. The unrefined color of pure Shea Butter is the greenish or ivory color that comes naturally to the cream. Since it is unrefined and not processed with any harmful chemical, it retains the color of pure Shea Butter.

The earthy aroma of pure Shea Butter may smell peculiar at first, but the scent eventually grows on you. Refined Shea Butter not only removes the aroma of the cream, but also makes it blend better with other, often questionable, ingredients. This gives the Shea Butter products more of a variety and can appeal to all kinds of noses. However, the quality of refined Shea Butter suffers.

Uses For Pure Shea Butter

Pure Shea Butter is commonly used as either an ingredient for cosmetics or as a moisturizer itself. Due to the high demand for it, some cosmetics manufacturers use a small amount of it in some of their products and yet label it a Shea Butter product. In cases like these, you are not really getting your money’s worth since it is not purely Shea Butter.

You might like to read the ingredients and the percentage of what it contains before you buy the product.

Unrefined Shea Butter

Once you are confronted with the dizzying choices of different Shea Butter products, you will have a hard time making up your mind which product to choose.

Herbaceous And Delightful

Take for example one of the better products sold by the African Shea Butter Company that is known as Cape Chamomile and Lavender that is herbaceous and delightful as well as uplifting and this excellent baby butter will have you feeling and looking better though be aware that most Shea Butter products are very concentrated and that just one teaspoon of it will be enough to moisturize your entire body.

West Africa Shea Butter and Import Company

There are other African sheabutter distributors too that you can use for sourcing Shea Butter and one such is West Africa Shea Butter and Import CO. LLC (WASB), which is the sole manufacturing as well as processing company in the US with facilities in Burkina Faso in West Africa and WASB does not buy ingredients from secondary contractors or subcontracts production and is based in Forth Worth, Texas.

WASB aims to produce as well as provide the best quality in Shea Butter and with its close ties to its women workers in Burkina Faso every effort is made by this African sheabutter company to make the best as well as purest type of unrefined Shea Butter following techniques that have been passed down from generations and combining them with present day technologies.

Suppliers for African Shea Butter

There are plenty of suppliers for African Shea Butter and you can be sure to find many an African sheabutter company that is engaged in supplying pure as well as unrefined Shea Butter even in wholesale quantities. So, if you are looking for Alaffia Shea Butter, Shea Butter face creams and Shea Butter lotions as well as Shea Butter soaps you should check out Alaffia Fair Trade Shea Butter.

Since unrefined Shea Butter is very valuable as a natural resource for countries in West Africa you can be sure to find many African sheabutter traders that are helping their countries to empower the local as well as national economies.

The only trouble is that the trade practices are not so fair when dealing with countries in Europe as well as with the United States and those who are working hard hand crafting this excellent oil receive just a pittance and it is estimated that even in spite of working thirty hours in a week, the worker receives less than a dollar in the form of compensation.

African Shea Butter

In fact, if you have dry and over-processed hair or you find that there is damage that has been done to your hair, then the natural Shea Butter products can be used to good effect and it has been found that you will get tremendous improvement by using products such as SheaMoisture Total Hair Care Set which can also be used in combination with Total Hair Care Set to provide your hair with outstanding foundation and which should become a part of your hair care routine.

Repairs Damaged Hair

If you want to repair your hair that has been damaged, you can use a Shea Butter hair care product along with a daily moisturizer and soon you will notice that your damaged hair will start to look healthy once more.

If you buy the SheaMoisture Total Hair Care Set you get eight ounces of Shea Butter Shampoo and a like amount of Shea Butter Leave-in Conditioner and four ounces of Shea Butter Herbal Pomade as well as two ounces of Shea Butter Hair and Scalp Serum which should be sufficient to take care of most of your hair problems.

When you use the Shea Butter hair care product, it will help in revitalizing your hair though you must remember to use it by massaging a good amount of unrefined Shea Butter on the scalp and also into your hair and then you should take a warm towel to wrap your head and leave it that way for half an hour after which you can remove the towel and then style the way you want it.

Natural Hair Growth

You will notice that by using a Shea Butter hair care product for your hair, you should expect to see positive results which will leave your hair looking silky and which will also feel very smooth.

To get best results with your Sheabutter hair products, you should make it a point to apply it at least two times in the week on your hair and once every week on the scalp, and the end result should be a better texture of your hair and it also moistens your hair while letting it grow better as well, and finally it gives you a groomed look.

For better protection, you must remember to apply a Sheabutter hair product to your hair before going swimming so that your hair is not damaged by chlorine or even by salt, and once you have finished your swim, you must shampoo your hair and also condition it immediately and you may also want to apply small amount of Shea Butter and hair products before as well as after you have dried your hair.

Shea Butter Hair

Shea butter is a natural product that is able to offer a bevy of benefits, namely for the skin. You will notice the following changes in your skin if you use Shea butter regularly: balanced oil production, decreased fine lines and wrinkles, increased suppleness and smoothness, increased circulation of blood to the face for a more youthful glow, and improved cellular turnover of dead skin for radiant complexion.

By heating Shea butter you can make Shea butter products yourself to use on your skin, and the results are so incredible that you will almost be able to notice them immediately after first use.

How to Heat Shea Butter

The first step involved when it comes to the matter of heating Shea butter is to set up a broiler, as you would melt chocolate in, and use this to melt the Shea butter. Just make sure that you keep the heat at a minimal level as to not burn the Shea butter and never leave the room because it will only take a few moments for the butter to heat up until it is finished.

But… make sure you add as little heat as possible, because heat affects your shea butter grade, since heat always promotes rancidity and oxidation.

Shea Butter Products

If you would rather just spend a bit of extra money and purchase already made Shea butter products, then there are a few different companies you are going to want to check out.

The Shea Butter Shop, for one, is a great option, and they offer a wonderful selection of pure African Shea butter products, all of which are offered at excellent prices.

A few of their offered products are:

• Afrikan Beauty’s Black Soap,
• Afrikan Beauty’s Pure Shea Butter Lotion,
• All Naturals 100% Pure Shea Butter,
• All Naturals Oil-O-Shea Body Wash, and
• All Naturals Shea Butter Hand and Body Moisturizer.

Karite Gold is another great option for Shea Butter products, and their formulas have been tested and tried and offer unequalled skin moisturizing, clinically proven anti-aging properties, stretch mark prevention and minimization, protection against inflammations, and rapid healing for burns.

If you decide to buy rather than make your Shea Butter products, then just make sure that the preserves have been kept in the Shea butter so that you can receive as plentiful of benefits as possible.

Shea Butter Recipe

Many of the elderly women in villages in Africa have nearly flawless skin with almost no signs of aging. The natural product Shea Butter has been used for centuries in parts of the African Continent because of its moisturizing and healing properties. Because of the natural healing and skin softening properties of Shea Butter, scientists have decided to take them a step further. Studies in these villages discovered what else these women were using from Shea Butter. The results were astonishing.

Chocolate, Cocoa Butter and Shea Butter

Further efforts on the refining and filtering of African Shea Butter in countries such Burkina Faso or Ghana came up with amazing results. They started new ways to better process and clean Shea Butter. They discovered these women used the bark from the shea trees for medicinal purposes and the shells of the nuts for mosquito repellant. As the nut and butter trade started to flourish, a substitute for cocoa butter was discovered.

Sheabutter products are not only skin moisturizers now, but are used in the chocolate manufacturing industry as an inexpensive and useful substitute for cocoa butter. Shea Butter helps to keep chocolate from melting. Therefore, the demand for Shea Butter products from Africa has increased dramatically. Shea Butter is very plentiful in Africa and is a wild resource in West, Central and East Africa.

The rural women in these regions of Africa, who harvest the nuts, send them to local markets that in turn, send them to the international market going to Holland, Sweden, Denmark and England. The women obtain the product Shea Butter by crushing and boiling and now scientists are learning how to separate the butter into two phases; the liquid (olein) and the solid (stearin).

Cosmetics And Confectionary

The solid is used for chocolate and the liquid part is used for cosmetics and healing products. The United States has yet to get approval from the FDA for allowing Shea Butter in chocolate.

As it is now, rich European Chocolates are often made with Shea Butter products. Evidently for the past 30 years vegetable oils have been substituted with Shea Butter oil in their chocolates. It seems that European Chocolates are known as a delicacy, so maybe the European Chocolatiers have really stumbled upon a good concept in cocoa butter substitutes.