The best emollient for our skin straight from the tree?

Have you wondered what this popularity of shea butter is all about? Why does shea butter work so well for your skin and why not opt for the “easier to use” creams from the corpo? The answer is very simple:

Shea butter is an organic emollient containing high levels of lipids, which (this is important) are extremely compatible with our skin! It is not a cream containing 80% water. It is a 100% cosmetic fat containing 100% of just such different lipids.

So basically, the shea tree transfers its own lipids back to your lipid mantle. Exactly the ones you need! What a bizarre correlation between the world of fauna and flora, isn’t it? As a curiosity, I would add that shea butter, for example, contains a fatty acid (linoleic acid) that is found in breast milk.

Doesn’t that sound surprising? The environment is constantly breaking down the lipids in your skin – a normal thing – in every possible way. And there’s a tree growing in Africa that – somehow – happens to produce lipids, the vast majority of which are the ones our skin produces/contains/needs.

Shea butter for wrinkles?

This tropical emollient also has good water-binding properties and is quickly absorbed into the skin. It helps to keep the skin moisturised for a long time. These moisturising benefits will have a smoothing and filling effect on wrinkled skin, old skin, undernourished skin. In short, shea butter is recommended, in many cultures, simply for wrinkles. When it comes to preserving youth, it is worth recalling that shea butter is also rich in antioxidants, or in other words, it counteracts the reaction of our cells with free radicals…. but that’s a topic for another time 🙂

P.S. In the title photo, Ghanaian women are working at harvesting shea nuts. The shea tree is the small tree in the back, on the right, not the big one the ladies are sitting at. This ‘small’ shea tree is actually already big and old.