Today’s project is another back-to-basics post—we’re making an all-natural Super Simple Whipped Shea Butter! You’ll need just four basic ingredients to create this decadent body butter. It’s not greasy, you don’t need to heat anything up, and half of the ingredients are easily substituted. If you’ve never made a whipped body butter before, or you just want to understand how they work a bit better, this post is a brilliant place to start. In the post, I’ll be going over the essential elements of this body butter and explaining why we use each ingredient, while the video focusses more on the making technique. Let’s dive in!
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What is whipped body butter?
We’ll start with a brief overview of what a whipped body butter is. Basically, it’s a soft butter that has been further softened with just enough liquid oil that it can be whipped up, and will stay soft and whippy throughout its life. If it’s too firm, the butter will seize after whipping and won’t be soft and scoopy. If it’s too soft, it’ll melt readily and won’t remain light and airy. Make sure you watch the video for a bit of a show-and-tell featuring different consisitencies! Once you have that basic soft butter and oil blend down, you can incorporate other ingredients to customize the formulation (depending on what you’re incorporating, this may require adjusting the oil and butter ratios). Have fun experimenting!
This is a very simple body butter formulation, and that’s the point. If you’re looking for something a bit fancier, you can find all my body butter formulations here!
Ingredients Overview
Shea Butter
The shea butter in this formulation is the star ingredient—there’s more shea butter in this formulation than anything else. I’ve selected shea butter for this formulation because it’s very popular and easy to get. It’s also lovely on the skin! If I have dry, irritated skin, you’ll find me slathering myself in shea butter.
Shea butter provides the structure of the formulation; because it’s soft (rather than brittle, like cocoa butter), it provides a great base for a body butter that will be soft when it’s done.
The shea I’m using today is from Baraka Shea Butter. This lovely shea butter is raw and unrefined, meaning it is slightly beige-y/yellow in colour and has what is generally described as a “characteristic” odour. It’s a bit smokey and nutty, and very distinctly “shea butter” to anyone familiar with shea butter. Some people love the way raw shea butter smells, some people hate it, and some are indifferent. I’d say I’m on the indifferent-to-positive side of things.
Whenever you use raw shea butter as the star ingredient in a formulation, its scent will come through in the end product. In my experience, attempts to cover it up are fairly futile (the shea note always ends up coming through, often leading people to add more and more essential oils until they end up with a product that contains so much essential oil that you shouldn’t use it on the skin… and there will still be a base note of shea!). You’ll either want to work with that natural shea scent, choosing essential oils that complement it (I really like grapefruit and cardamom for this!), or you’ll want to use a refined shea butter so you can scent it as desired.
Since we are cold processing this body butter, your shea butter needs to smooth from the get-go. Massage a bit between your fingers—if you feel any sand-like beads or lumps that are slow to melt, that’s not a shea butter you’ll want to use for this formulation.
If you live somewhere very hot, you’ll need to use more shea butter and less liquid oil to get the end consistency just right (also, please read this, tropical folks!). If you live somewhere quite cold, it’s just the opposite. You’ll want to combine, whip, and wait—at least 5 hours for a 40–50g batch, but overnight sure is easy. That resting time will give you the opportunity to see if the butter softens into something mostly liquid, hardens too much, or stays just right.
When you’re formulating whipped body butters you can work with all kinds of soft butters like mango butter, murumuru butter, and cupuacu butter—just keep in mind that different butters will require different butter-to-oil ratios (this is often true when comparing refined and raw versions of butters as well).
Sunflower Oil
We’re using sunflower oil to soften the shea to that just-right consistency, so it can be whipped up nicely and stay soft and beautiful. You could use any liquid oil (or blend of liquid oils & emollients) for instead of sunflower oil, but I do recommend choosing something that is relatively fast absorbing and has a nice skin feel (castor oil, for instance, would not be a great choice!). Good options include safflower oil, grapeseed oil, sweet almond oil, apricot kernel oil, and jojoba oil. You could also try other liquid emollients like isopropyl myristate (IPM) or C12-15 alkyl benzoate.
Corn Starch
For all of shea butter’s strengths, it is a very slow absorbing butter, meaning products made with a lot of it can feel greasy and heavy on the skin. That’s where corn starch comes in! The starch counters the greasiness, making for a much lighter feeling finished product. If you don’t have corn starch you could easily use a different starch like arrowroot starch.
Vitamin E
We include a small amount of vitamin E as an antioxidant, to extend the shelf life of the body butter by delaying the onset of rancidity. Because this formulation does not contain any water, no broad-spectrum preservative (like Liquid Germall Plus [INCI: Propylene Glycol, Diazolidinyl Urea, Iodopropynyl Butylcarbamate]) is required.
Helpful Resources & Further Reading
- Video: 5 Common Questions on Body Butter (Will this melt in hot weather?, How can I make this less greasy?, and more)
- Will this melt in hot weather?
- Shelf life questions
- Encyclopedia: Shea butter
- How much essential oil can I add to this recipe?
- How can I make this thicker/harder/firmer?
- How can I make this thinner/softer/less viscous?
- How can I incorporate X ingredient into a formulation?
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Super Simple Whipped Shea Butter
22g | 55% shea butter
5.8g | 14.5% corn starch
12g | 30% sunflower seed oil (USA / Canada / UK / NZ)
0.2g | 0.5% Vitamin E MT-50 (USA / Canada)Weigh the shea butter into a small bowl that’s deep and large enough for whipping in. You’ll need an electric mixer fitted with one beater for batches 100g (3.5oz) and smaller (as written here). Start by mashing the shea butter up a bit with the beater to get it into smallish clumps, and then fire up your electric mixer and whip the shea until it is smooth and uniform.
Add the corn starch, sunflower seed oil, and vitamin E. Stir/mash the mixture around a bit to roughly combine, and then whip away! You’re looking for the mixture to be whippy and smooth, and it will noticeably lighten in colour. Be sure to stop and scrape down the sides of your bowl and beater a few times to ensure a thorough, even blend.
Once the butter is lightweight and whippy, gently scoop it into a wide-mouthed tub or jar, and that’s it! I used a 50mL (1.69fl oz) black jar from YellowBee for my 40g batch, and that worked beautifully.
To use, smooth a small amount over skin that could use some TLC. Take care not to over-apply as it is quite rich!
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 or two 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 & Troubleshooting
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.
- Please read the blog post; alternatives for the three main ingredients are discussed very clearly.
- To learn more about the ingredients used in this formulation, 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.
- If your body butter is too hard, reduce the amount of shea butter and increase the liquid oil.
- If your body butter is too soft, reduce the amount of liquid oil and increase the shea butter.
- If you’d like to incorporate an essential oil or fragrance oil, reduce the liquid oil by 0.5% to make room for 0.5% essential oil of choice. Be sure to watch maximum usage rates for the specific essential oil(s) you are using.
Gifting Disclosure
The shea butter was gifted by Baraka Shea Butter. The 50mL (1.69fl oz) black jar was gifted by YellowBee.
Thank you for sharing this formulation. To cut the grease, I make half-mango butter, half-Shea butter body butter. Would the percentages you listed work for these ingredients?
The starch in this formulation cuts the grease, so you don’t need mango butter 🙂 If you want to use it anyways this would be a good place to start, but you’ll likely still need to tweak the ratios. Happy making!
Thank you so much! This is exactly what I was hoping to make this week and I already have all of the ingredients! I have some sunflower oil that has been infusing dried rose petals for several weeks that will be perfect.
Oooh, that’ll be downright decadent! Thanks for DIYing with me, and happy making 🙂
It’s a long one… Sorry
Hey Marie. I’m so glad you posted this. I’ve been trial and erroring a lot with my body butter formulation because I do live in the Caribbean. So at night it’s 24-28 °C and during the day its 32°C – 35°C. I’ve been trying to find a happy ratio medium because the recipe I really like has the perfect consistency at night and on a hot day it’s has a molten lava consistency and it looks almost like it’s weeping.
My shea butter ratio is about 60% and the oils- caprylic/capric triglyceride about 28-30% and the recipe has about 6% beeswax with arrowroot, vitamin e and mica.
So I think it just needs a tiny bit of hardness again to survive the daytime heat.
I’m wondering what would be the best course of action without compromising the glidy feeling. (Which I do notice isn’t as glidy when applied right out the shower)
-increase the butter portion
-increase the wax portion
-decrease the oil portion
Thank you for this post
Hey Sahara! This sounds like an absolutely lovely problem to have, ha—though I am saying that from my “always cold in Canada” perspective lol. Anywho! I honestly don’t have much experience with formulating in ongoing super hot weather because I don’t live in it. Today is likely going to be the hottest day of the year and the high is 33°C… we’ll do that once, maybe twice a year. Sigh. But! I highly recommend reading my interview with Jhade. She lives in Trinidad & Tobago and shared some of her hot weather formulating tips 🙂 Happy making!
Thanks Marie ! A fellow Trini yay!
This is SO GREAT! Thank You! I live in Florida so it is hot all year around and my whipped body butter always came up a bit runny no matter what recipe I tried…now thanks to you I realized why the percentage rates and how you explain it is Amazing. Just a small hint for the piping bag…use a small sandwich bag and cut the corner in an X shape to squeeze the whip out in a perfect shape in the jar Thanks Again!.
I created a lotion very similar to this one in January, but I have a question about it, and was wondering if you could help! (I checked the FAQs, but I’m still unsure.)
My recipe has aloe gel in it (the gel is from amazon. The brand name is NaturSense), and I was wondering if a preservative is needed…The gel doesn’t have any water in it, but I’m not sure if aloe gel is technically a “water” ingredient, if you know what I mean. It’s been about 3 months, and no mold has sprouted in my lotion yet…at least, not that I can see. do you think it’ll be fine on it’s own, or should I add a preservative just to be safe? Any help is appreciated! Thanks 🙂
Aloe vera gel is absolutely a water ingredient, and a preservative is a must 🙂
Hi Catalina,
May I ask in what ratio you’re using the gel?
Thanks!
Katy
Hi, Katy! I used about 8g.–9 g. of the aloe gel I mentioned in a 50 g. batch of lotion (actually, it’s more of a butter than a lotion). I’m still tweaking the recipe and figuring out what works best, but it’s a slow process as I make one batch at a time and wait until I finish it to make the next experiment batch. So far, I’m liking the amount of aloe gel I put in this batch (about 8 g.). I hope that helps! 🙂
Thanks so much! I hope this batch works for you!
Hi, Marie: I made this recipe twice and I still had that dreaded graininess in the shea butter. Would you know why this happened? Thanks. C
Since the shea isn’t melted here, that means your shea butter must be grainy as-is. I recommend checking out one of my shea formulations where the butter is melted and then brought to trace 🙂 Check out the Humblebee & Me DIY Encyclopedia (https://www.humblebeeandme.com/diy-encyclopedia/) for shea links, and the FAQ for more info on graininess!
I’ve made a body butter very similar to your recipe, however I didn’t add corn starch, and find it very greasy. Can I remelt my body butter and add it in now?
Hey Cindy! If the body butter is whipped you probably don’t need to melt it down—you should be able to just whip in some starch 🙂 Just make sure you weigh everything and keep careful notes so you can re-create it later if you love it (or learn from it if you don’t 🙂 ). Happy making!
I’m searching your site for recommendations on equipment and can’t find what I’m looking for, which is the brand of those perfectly sized little bowls! If you have a moment I’d love to know where you found them.
Thanks!
Thrift shop 🙂
Hi! Can I use this as a hair mask too? I’ve been looking for some recipe but I find shea butter to greasy for my fine hair. I think the cornstarch might be what I need.
You can definitely try it! I’d also recommend checking out some of my emulsified hair masks and treatments; this one and this one have both received great feedback ❤️ Happy making!
I love this recipe. I made a 200g batch 8 months ago and it is super stable to this day. No separation at all. Maybe because I whipped it really well. I don’t use it that often because living in the tropics I normally use light lotions than body butters, however I use it during cooler nights and makes my skin super soft the next day. Will definitely make this as gifts for the coming Holidays! Thanks so much!
hey marie!
may i know what mixer you use?
Second this question please (it looks like you may have added a link in your recipe but it isn’t clickable)
Please read these posts to learn more: Ten pieces of equipment for new formulators: Part 1 Ten pieces of equipment for new formulators: Part 2 🙂 The mixer is just something I grabbed at a thrift shop a decade ago, the precise model doesn’t matter (and probably isn’t available anymore at any rate).
Hi Marie can I use clay like kaolin and bentonite clay instead or starch in this
Try it and see!
Hello Marie. Thank you for this amazing super simple recipe. I do luv it! I’d like to ask can I use tapioca starch instead of corn starch?
Hi Maria! This is covered in the paragraph in the post about the starch, please give it a read. Happy making!
This was my first ever whipped body butter! 🙂 It was in fact super simple to make.
Because it was my first try I didn´t want to mess around with the % so I kept as it is. I didn´t have sunflower seed oil so I used grape seed oil instead, it worked really nicely!
I made it on November 2021 and I live at the beach, so it has been holding up really good since it´s not quite super hot yet. I will see on the hotter months if I need to play around with the %
🙂
Hi, new to the site and loving it so far. Is there any reason not to use silk amino acids and corn starch in the same recipe? Do you have a ratio guide for both additives?
Hi – I made this yesterday and I love it! We are in a super dry winter season! I added essential oil but I’m wondering if I did the calculation right? I am using the total weight of all the oil in the recipe and then multiplying by 0.5 for half a percent. I hate math but this morning all is well and it smells great. I really want to learn this essential oil formula for lotions etc. Does anyone have any online site recommendations.
Woah, this is awesom! I made this few minutes ago and can’t believe how easy it was to make and how nice it feels on skin. Makes tattoos look sharp too. Thank you!
Hi Marie,
Is there another method to cut greasiness without using the starch? Maybe I didn’t mix it well enough, but I can feel the small grains as I apply the butter. Other than that, it’s wonderful!
Thanks!
Hi Mary,
I just tried your recipe and it worked very great ! ( I didnt have starch sorry I used flour just to test, but i m heading to the market now to get me some starch)
Please I would love to add fragrance to the butter, I am looking for someth smelling like perfume, since I am not really into essential oils right now.
Do you have an article on how to add fragrance to body butter/creams DIYs? Which ingredient to use and how much of it to not irritate the skin.
Thanks a lot