I am straight-up smitten with the whippy texture and skin feel of this Rosé Whipped Body Butter. It’s fluffy and rich (like marshmallow fluff!) in the jar, but starts to melt quickly on skin contact. It glides across the skin lightly before absorbing in a flash, leaving skin soft but not greasy. It smells fabulous, is a very fun pink colour, and is generally very fun. It makes a great gift as well as a fabulous treat for yourself. Let’s get whippy!

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The base is just two ingredients—cupuaçu butter and camellia seed oil. These two beautiful fats have been favourites of mine from my early days of DIYing. I remember being intrigued by the description of cupuaçu butter’s skin feel as “silicone-like” and immediately ordered some. At that point, my butter experiences were limited to shea butter and cocoa butter, neither of which could ever be described as “silicone-like”, so I obviously had to experience it myself. The first cupuaçu I tried was unrefined—it looked like small yellow beads and smelled like a combination of cocoa butter and sour milk (and that’s being charitable… raw cupuaçu does not smell amazing). The skin feel was incredibly silky and I could definitely see where the silicone-y description came in. I wasn’t crazy about the smell, so when I re-ordered I grabbed a tub of refined butter. Much better!

I grabbed my first bottle of camellia seed oil after reading about its incredibly fast absorption speed and silky skin after-feel. The description didn’t disappoint! Camellia seed oil is wonderfully light with a stunning skin feel, leaving the skin feeling all kinds of soft and wonderful. The combination of lightweight camellia seed oil and creamy, rich-but-not-greasy cupuaçu butter is stunning. Rich, creamy, whippy, and wonderful, but also fast-absorbing with a beautiful skin feel. The specific ratio I’ve combined them at makes for a blend with a perfect on-skin melting point, and I’m pretty stoked about that.

Speaking of that ratio—cupuaçu butter is a bit odd when I look back on my other soft butter/liquid oil experiments. If you look at this whipped body butter you’ll see the soft butter (a blend of mango + mowrah) makes up roughly 75% of the formula. In this formulation, the soft butter is just 43.9%—quite the drop—but the end texture is very similar. When I was formulating this I started with blends of 60% and 50% cupuaçu butter, and both seized up quite stupendously within twelve hours. I was definitely surprised as I had been pretty sure the 50% version would be too soft, but nope—too hard! I slowly added more liquid oil, taking notes, re-whipping, and waiting, until I had a blend that stayed all marshmallowy and beautiful, and here we are.

The decadent fragrance comes from a combination of things—rich rose wax, dry and fresh cognac essential oil, and juicy lemon slices fragrance oil. It’s warm, sweet, fresh, juicy, and utterly intoxicating. We get a touch of colour and shimmer from some rose-coloured mica, though that’s optional. The finished body butter is decadent and delightful. I chose to just scoop mine into a jar, but if you want to get extra fancy you could pipe it into a jar with a fancy piping tip. Enjoy!

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Rosé Whipped Body Butter

Heated phase
17.56g | 43.9% cupuacu butter (USA / Canada)
0.4g | 1% rose wax

Post-heat phase
21.04g | 52.6% camellia seed oil

Cool down phase
0.24g | 0.6% green cognac essential oil
0.16g | 0.4% lemon slices fragrance oil
0.4g | 1% rose mica
0.2g | 0.5% Vitamin E MT-50 (USA / Canada)

Prepare a water bath by bringing about 3cm/1″ of water to a bare simmer over low to medium-low heat in a small saucepan.

Weigh the cupuaçu butter and rose wax into a small heat-resistant bowl that’s deep and large enough for whipping in. Place the bowl in the water bath to melt the butter through. Once the mixture has liquified, remove the bowl from the heat and stir in the camellia seed oil.

Now it’s time to chill the mixture. I placed it in the freezer for about ten minutes, stirred, and froze it for another five or so minutes. You don’t want the body butter to be rock hard, but it should be solid. When you get there, it’s time to whip it!

Grab your electric beaters and whip away for about two minutes (scraping the bowl down as needed), and then freeze for annother five. Repeat this cycle about three or four times, until the whipped body butter holds soft peaks well.

Now it’s time to weigh out the cool down ingredients. Because cool down ingredients are present at very low amounts you’ll need to use an accurate scale—preferably one accurate to 0.01g. As these more accurate scales tend to have fairly low (100–200g) maximum weights you won’t be able to put the entire batch of body butter on that scale without blowing it out. So—grab a smaller dish. Add a scoop or two of body butter, and then weigh the cool down ingredients into that, using the more accurate scale. Stir to thoroughly incorporate, and then transfer that back into the master batch of body butter. Whip that all together.

Lastly, I like to let the body butter fully come to room temperature before checking it one last time to make sure it’s doing what I want it to do at room (aka storage) temperature. For a 40g batch I left it for about one hour; if you’ve scaled up you’ll likely need to leave it for longer. Once it’s settled at room temperature, give it a poke and make sure you’re still happy with the consistency—that it hasn’t melted into a puddle or anything unpleasant (side note: if you are swapping out the cupuacu butter or otherwise fiddling with the core butter/oil ratios, you’ll want to leave the whipped butter for at least 12 hours to ensure it’s not seizing up—as I was developing this formula I was leaving the whipped butters for days to test the ratios… this is the territory you’ll be in if you don’t like the consistency after an hour. If you live somewhere quite hot, please read this.).

If everything looks peachy, give it another whipped and gently spoon the finished body butter into a jar, taking care not to squash it too much. I used a 250mL white screw-top jar from YellowBee for an 80g batch. And that’s it! To use, massage into skin that could use some pampering and enjoy. Make sure you store the body butter in a temperature somewhat similar to the one in which it was made—it will readily melt if exposed to high temperatures, and it won’t have that lovely whippy consistency when it re-solidifies.

Shelf Life & Storage

Because this body butter is 100% oil-based, it does not require a broad-spectrum preservative (broad spectrum preservatives ward off microbial growth, and microbes require water to live—no water, no microbes!). Kept reasonably cool and dry, it should last at least a year before any of the oils go rancid. If you notice it starts to smell like old nuts or crayons, that’s a sign that the oils have begun to oxidize; chuck it out and make a fresh batch if that happens.

Substitutions

As always, be aware that making substitutions will change the final product. While these swaps won’t break the recipe, you will get a different final product than I did.

• As I’ve provided this recipe in percentages as well as grams you can easily calculate it to any size using a simple spreadsheet as I’ve explained in this post. As written in grams this recipe will make 40g.
• To learn more about the ingredients used in this recipe, including why they’re included and what you can substitute them with, please visit the Humblebee & Me Encyclopedia. It doesn’t have everything in it yet, but there’s lots of good information there! If I have not given a specific substitution suggestion in this list please look up the ingredient in the encyclopedia before asking.
• I don’t recommend substituting the cupuaçu butter. If you do, choose a soft and relatively fast-absorbing butter like mango or mowrah, and keep in mind you will likely need to tweak the liquid oil/butter ratio.
• You can use another super lightweight/fast-absorbing oil instead of the camellia seed oil. Rosehip, grapeseed, and apricot kernel oil could all be good choices.
• You have two options for substituting the rose wax:
  • If you want to use rose otto essential oil, use it at 0.02% (that is the maximum usage level) and add 0.98% cupuaçu butter. This is going to result in a much weaker rose note.
  • If you want to use a rose fragrance oil I’d use it at 0.3% and add 0.7% cupuaçu butter.
• Lemon essential oil would work well in place of the lemon slices fragrance oil, and the usage rate is low enough not to be photosensitizing. Litsea cubeba would also work.
• You can use a different colour of mica, or replace it with more camellia seed oil.
• You can use a different scent blend if you’d like.