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 "The Baby Balm is fab, my friend bought me a tub at Horsmonden fete for my 16 month old son's ezcema, it has worked like a miracle on what was awful ezcema causing much distress. I am recommending it to all my friends. His consultant paediatritian can't believe what a huge difference it has made, no more steroid creams - hoorah." Ruth from Kent What is Shea Butter? So you’ve heard about shea butter but you’re not entirely sure what it is? Well, you’ve come to the right place to learn more. In a word shea butter is astonishing. Shea butter is a yellowish-green butter/solid oil which is extracted from the nut of the shea, or karité tree. The trees are found mainly in a band of sub-Saharan Africa (Babaloo’s shea butter comes from Togo). It has become known as “Women’s Gold” not only through its miraculous healing and moisturising properties but also because it is one of the very few economic commodities controlled by women in rural Africa. Shea butter contains naturally occurring vitamin A and vitamin E as well as complex fatty acids. Now we all know that vitamins are good, in the case of shea butter because they feed and nourish the skin but the complex fatty acids are absolutely fall-over fantastic – these are what separate shea butter from so many other products on the market today such as cocoa butter and other vegetable butters. Fatty acids cannot be produced by the body but are essential for healthy skin. They help to restore natural elasticity to the skin and promote regeneration of damaged skin cells, which is why shea butter has so many uses (See below). There are two types of shea butter – refined (not good) and unrefined (gooood). Babaloo’s shea butter is unrefined and is therefore 100% pure. The refining process involves a lot of things you’d probably rather not know about. For example, heating the shea butter to over 400°F and then bunging in loads of harsh chemicals such as hexane and sodium hydroxide. It doesn’t sound nice because it isn’t. Heating the shea to that temperature means it loses much of its goodness and healing properties, and the addition of chemicals means there are inevitably some of those chemical nasties left over in the finished product. Then you put them on your skin, and that’s just plain bad. No names mentioned, but most high street stores sell only refined shea butter which might look nice, clean and “sanitary” but which lacks the true healing properties of unrefined shea butter such as, you’ve guessed it, Babaloo’s! Why Shea Butter? Soooo many reasons. Here’s a list of what shea butter is good for: Daily skin moisturiser (face and body), chapped skin, stretch marks, nappy rash, wrinkles, blemishes, scars, stings, minor burns (including sunburn), cracked skin (especially overworked hands), eczema, dermatitis, cracked and dry feet and elbows, arthritis, athlete’s foot, after shave balm, scalp irritation, acne, lip balm, hair revitalisation, massages, blisters….the list goes on. In fact you can use shea butter in place of cooking oil, but we don’t recommend you try it with ours because eating the essential oils that we add isn’t a good idea. So don’t, OK? Anyway, we like to think of shea butter as a skin food, because it feeds goodness back into your skin, making it healthy, lustrous, moisturised and great looking! Who makes it? We do. No, who makes it before you make it even nicer than it already is? Ah. Well, Babaloo’s shea butter comes from a women’s cooperative in Togo. Sadly most shea butter on sale in Europe and the US is not fairly traded which means the women who work so hard to gather the nuts and process them into this remarkable final product receive only a tiny fraction of the final price. Like about $1 for 30 hours work. That’s the harsh reality. Not so at Babaloo. Our shea butter comes from a fair trade source which means that in addition to the women receiving fair and steady incomes, a large percentage of the money we pay for the bulk shea butter goes straight back to their community in the form of useful things like community enhancement projects, AIDS and malaria outreach, and educational scholarships. When we get our hands on the shea butter back in the UK we store it in a cold storage facility near Babaloo Barn in Kent. When we come to use it, we hand-make small batches to ensure consistent high quality results. That’s all very nice. So how is it made? Shea butter is harvested and manufactured by hand. The women who do this are amazing, dedicated, hard working people who will trek over 10km (further than most of us travel by foot each week) through the savannah to harvest the nuts and who will then trek that same distance back with dozens of kilos of shea nuts balanced on their heads. At this point most of us would hang up our shea gloves and head to the pub. Not so here. This is when the really hard work begins! After the shea fruits are collected, they are steamed to cause the kernel inside to shrink away from the shell. The shea kernels are then placed in the sun to dry for a prolonged period. The dried shea kernels are inspected and sorted to remove the undesirable kernels. They are then crushed in a large, wooden mortar or with an electric grinder. The crushed shea kernels are grilled slightly to reduce the water content. The kernels are then ground into powder which is then mixed with clear, potable water. The resulting mixture is whipped by hand until the colour changes. The kneading process takes anywhere from one to three hours. The shea fats are collected and heated slightly to remove any remaining moisture. The clear oil is gravity filtered into clean basins to cool. The time from selecting the nuts until this step takes from 10 to 14 hours. A long day’s work. After the shea oil has cooled down, it is stirred very carefully to initialise the crystallisation process and form the shea butter. This part of the process is critical and requires a lot of experience. The final step is to pour the partially crystallised butter into containers, where it continues to crystallise. The containers are stored in cool storage rooms until they are shipped to Babaloo Barn. When it arrives at Babaloo Barn we have a little party and then get to work. We re-melt the shea butter and add a splash of organic jojoba oil and a few drops of wild or organic essential oils to soften it up and to add our unique fragrances. Then we pot it (by hand, of course) in our 95% recycled aluminium, stick our groovy little (recycled) labels on them and hey presto, Babaloo Shea Butter. As pure as you’ll find. Anything else? Not really. But we leave you with this thought: Unlike most cosmetics which promise to do nice things to your skin and then don’t, our shea butter is 100% pure and aside from the odd wild essential oil, it is 100% organic. So you have nothing to fear – all it can do is make you look and feel more beautiful than you already are! Click here if this has persuaded you to buy our shea butter. And if not, click here to see what other customers have said about it. |
