Eco-Chick · The modern girl's guide to living green & fabulous.

Shea Yummy

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by Starre Vartan · 06/22/06

This is my new summer moisturizer. I’ve always loved shea butter, but I had never found one that fit all my criteria (fair trade, organic, and unrefined).

Made from the nut of the shea tree that grows in West Africa (above), shea butter is naturally high in antioxidants, super-moisturizing, and makes skin really, really soft. The shea tree is not cultivated (so nuts are wild harvested) and takes about 40 years to mature. The tree is considered sacred and so are the nuts, which can be eaten.

I usually use olive or other veggie oils doused with aromatherapy after I shower because my skin is so dry, which works pretty well. But plain shea butter makes my skin silky (like they say in the commercials…but this is for real.)

Robyn Tisdale Scott, R.PH., Pharm.D. makes the Purely Natural shea butter (top picture) and she explains:

“Most commercially available shea butter products use refined shea butter and therefore lack the vital healing factors needed to provide true therapeutic benefits. This is because they are chemically extracted using dangerous petroleum by-products (hexane), and dangerously refined by bleaching, neutralized with toxic lye, and extremely over-heated.

Africa, Fair Trade, Moisturizer, oil, oils, Organic, rape, silk, skin, summer