Whipped body butter is usually made from a combination of different oils that coat your skin to give it suppleness. Most oils have omega-3 fatty acids, which can help your skin cells make healthy membranes, reduce inflammation, and promote healthy collagen.
Review Recipes
Consider a comparison between two different moisturizer recipes: one for a solid bar of moisturizing soap and one for a whipped butter that goes into a cosmetic jar. The bar is solid, while the body butter is viscous—a consistency between a liquid and a solid. The solid bar uses an even balance of oils, butter, and wax with a ratio of 3 ounces of beeswax, 3 ounces of cocoa butter, 3 ounces of shea butter, and 3 ounces of jojoba or another liquid oil. At room temperature, the bar is solid. The main reason the bar does not melt is the inclusion of the beeswax, which has a much higher melting temperature, as well as the use of harder oils, such as cocoa butter. A typical body butter recipe is heavier on the shea butter and does not contain beeswax; for example, 3 ounces of cocoa butter, 6 ounces of shea butter, and 3 ounces of jojoba or another liquid oil.
Reformulate the Recipe
To keep your body butter from liquefying in warmer temperature, you need to reformulate your recipe to increase hard oils or include beeswax. For example, a higher percentage of cocoa butter or the inclusion of beeswax would raise the melting temperature of the above product. A downside of adding hard oil is that it’s not going to melt as quickly on the skin, but it should at least hold its consistency a bit better in the container if the temperature spikes or if you apply body butter after a steamy bath or shower.
Shipping Body Butter
If you are selling your body butter formulation and have problems with shipping in the summer months due to liquefying, then you might need to reconsider your shipping practices. You can add emulsifiers, stabilizers, and other artificial ingredients to help the product remain solid, but, at that point, the intrinsic value of having a homemade, quality-ingredient body butter is lost at the sake of added chemicals. If you have a real problem, considering refusing to ship from May to September—or the months that are the hottest in the country or region in which you live. The journey from the shop to the customer’s door is too risky—hot trucks, hot warehouses, and hot front porches can all affect the integrity of the product. Some sellers tell customers to stock up from October through April. If you’re in the Southern Hemisphere, the applicable months are reversed.
