Secrets of Organic Shea Butter
The benefits of organic shea butter
The qualities of organic shea butter, a golden oil pressed from the nuts of the African karita tree, make it the quiet hero of skin care. A main ingredient in blushes, face cleansers, foundation, eye shadow, and suncream, pure and organic shea butter benefits the skin by the very similar molecular similarity of its essential fatty acid, stearic acid, to the natural oils that moisturize, supplicate, condition, and beautify your skin.
The golden ivory colors of organic shea fruit butter benefit cosmetic care of every type of skin, qualifying it as the main ingredient of the well-known skin care products Xenna and Oil of Olay. Its natural triglycerides make it an ideal replacement for the natural lubricants aging, dry, or sun-damaged skin lack. The benefit of shea butter is that it can make rough skin feel smooth, dry skin feel supple, and replace the natural oils taken away by harsh soaps, cleansers, and sun damage.
To understand how shea fruit butter benefits the skin, it’s usefull to understand that the unrefined shea fruit, unlike some highly refined products, is not purely ‘butter’. Although pure shea butter is an emollient skin softener like lanolin, it has at least eight natural anti-oxidants, including catechin, gallic acid, epicatechin, epicatechin gallate, epigallocatechin, gallocatechin, epigallocatechin gallate, and gallocatechin gallate, as well as quercetin and trans-cinnamic acid. Also, pure shea butter benefits the skin by carrying any added active ingredient straight to the skin cells that need it more quickly than other nut oils or lanolin.
Shea butter contains unsaponifiable lipids. This means when you add them to water, they don’t get sudsy. And they protect the skin from products that do get sudsy, like detergents.
Pure shea butter benefits the skin in one more way that even many cosmetics and nutraceutical formulators do not realize. It promotes resorative microcirculation in the skin. After high-fat, high-sugar meals, the linings of blood vessels big and small simply lose their ability to relax and allow blood to flow. This is because the digestion of fats and sugars generates enormous amounts of free radicals that reach a maximum concentration around two hours after eating.
So organic shea fruit butter regularly applied to the skin provides healthy fats that reach the microscopic capillaries just below the skin to keep them open. This nourishes and oxygenates the skin, helping them carry away irritants, keeping the basal layer of the skin healthy so that dying skin cells can simply be pushed away.
What makes shea butter pure? The place the trees are grown and the nuts are harvested makes a tremendous difference in quality. Plants produce antioxidants to deal with stress. If a plant is never stressed, it does not need antioxidants. Shea nut trees that are grown in the dry, hotter West Africa produce nuts that contain up to three times as much antioxidant vitamin E than nuts grown on trees in cooler, damper East Africa. West African shea nuts also contain more of the healing emollient fats that keep skin wrinkle-free.
Even if you have the best quality shea fruit nuts, the benefits of shea butter will never come to be if the product is not processed carefully. The major cosmetics companies process their butter with the industrial solvent hexane to make sure the colour looks the same in every batch. Draining away the natural golden tint of shea butter makes a predictable, homogenized, colorless, odorless, and lifeless product, still valuable for its lubricant qualities.
But the full benefits of pure shea butter are found in organic shea butter. Simply processed through clay filters, this butter essential retains its natural golden tint and all its antioxidant potency. Organic shea butter provides stigmasterol, the plant chemical that helps relax tight and tense skin. It yields cinnamic acid, a natural suncream. And it both moisturizes the skin and protects the skin from the drying effects of harsh liquid detergents and hot water.
To give your skin all the benefits of pure shea butter, insist on a certified organic product such as the miessence cetified organic hand lotion. As you use it frequently, you will see it keeps your skin healthy, youthful, radiant, and wrinkle-free.
Frank Nunez writes regularly about health related topics. I hope you enjoy this article.