Using Low Melting Point Shea Butter in Your Soaps

Low Melting Point Shea Butter as an ingredient in Bar Soap

Shea butter is a wonderful addition to products for your skin, hair, and lips.  The properties act as a skin-conditioning agent to help heal many conditions.  Our brand uses this across our line of products.  In our bar soaps, we have used a low-melt shea butter at approximately 5% of the recipe. 

Shea butter is obtained from the nut of the African Shea Tree.  It is known for its emollient and moisturizing qualities.  It feels luxurious on the skin.  Shea has significant levels of vitamin A, E, F which means it promotes strong antioxidant activity.  In a raw form, shea butter is often used for smoothing wrinkles, sun protection, scar prevention, eczema, skin allergies, insect bites, and as a hair product that adds moisture and sheen. 

Shea butter added to your soap formulation will not add a lather to the bar.  It will, however, allow a silky moisturized feel to the bar soap.  The appropriate calculation does need to account for the addition of fatty acids into your cold processed soap for saponification.  A low melting point helps aid in the process of breaking down this butter to add into the oil mixture.  Basically, it doesn’t add the same amount of hard oils to the batch.  This helps reduce the amount of acceleration you have in your batch and keeps the focus on moisturizing rather than cleansing.  We already add a large contribution of coconut oil to help with the cleansing part.

Happy Soaping.