Grainy Shea Butter? Let’s Fix it!

You see those white little dots in your shea butter and it feels gritty and grainy? The good news is that grainy shea butter is very easily fixable. It involves remelting grainy shea butter with a double boiler and doesn’t require a lot of time or effort. I’ll also be talking about how to prevent grainy shea butter all together in this blog post.

Shea butter is hands down one of nature’s best beauty offerings –  where else can you find so many amazing skins benefits all wrapped up in a single ingredient? I absolutely love incorporating it in my recipes whenever I can and benefiting from its miraculous moisturizing and rejuvenating properties.

But what often puts a damper on my excitement in using shea butter-based products is that grainy texture that tends to sometimes develop in the finished homemade product. While it isn’t harmful to use and still has the same qualities, the texture isn’t pleasant to slather on your face or body.

So read on to find how to fix grainy shea butter!

What causes shea butter to be gritty?

So what exactly is grainy shea butter? And what causes it to become that way?

Shea butter contains high concentrations of a number of essential fatty acids—namely arachidic acid, lauric acid, linoleic acid, linolenic acid, oleic acid, palmitic acid, and stearic acid. Each of these fatty acids has its own unique melting, cooling point and solidifying temperature.

So when your shea butter undergoes this whole cycle of melting, cooling and then solidifying,—this could be while it’s being shipped to you, if you experience temperatures above 75 degrees F, or if you’re melting it to concoct a DIY skincare product— some grains or molecules of the butter cool off faster than the rest. The fatty acids that have separated and cooled off first tend to become more solid than the shea itself, lending the shea a grainy, gritty texture.

But while this grainy texture might be pretty displeasing to apply on your skin, the good news is that it does not mean that your shea butter has gone bad—it’s really just the separation of fatty acids and it does not affect the quality of the shea in any way.

How to fix grainy shea butter?

If you regularly experience high temperatures, especially during the summer months, it can be a bummer to find your whipped body butter, homemade lip balm, or other butter-rich products developing that annoying grainy texture.

But before you decide to chuck the whole thing out, hear this: Your gritty shea butter problems are fixable. And here’s how to fix it below!

 

 Does it matter if the Shea Butter is refined or unrefined?

Honestly, in all my years of experimenting with shea butter recipes, I haven’t found a difference between refined and unrefined shea butter where graininess is concerned. Both can develop a gritty texture if not stored at the right temperature.

Refined shea butter is the filtered, chemically altered version of unrefined butter. It has been bleached and deodorized to make it more aesthetically pleasing. The final product has a white color and doesn’t hold the strong nutty aroma of natural shea.

Having said that, I prefer to use unrefined shea butter in all of my DIY recipes, since it retains all of the healing, nutritive and moisturizing properties of natural shea.

And we’d want to include as much of that original goodness in our homemade natural recipes as we can, wouldn’t we?

if you are looking for inspiration, take a look at my 24 easy shea butter recipes!