Focus on Shea Butter

Shea Butter, a vegetal source of good fat with multiple actions

Shea butter is a highly nutritious and regenerating skin moisturizer. Its specific combination of fatty acids, sterols and vitamins A, D and E, plays a determining role in the health of skin cells, therefore placing shea butter as a choice product to protect, nurture and regenerate the skin.
Shea butter is also the oil with the highest unsaponifiable content, made of nutritious and regenerating organic elements that maintain the skin beautifully healthy.

In order to maintain all of its beneficial proprieties, the shea butter must be carefully elaborated. Indeed, the process by which the shea butter has gone through highly influences the quality and efficiency of the product. If the shea tree fruit is processed with aggressive chemical substances often used to obtain a whiter, odourless product, or if solvents are used in an industrial process, the shea butter will lose its vitamins and along with it a great part of its efficiency.

The Kariderm products are made with high quality, high efficiency, certified organic shea butter, traditionally made by African women, a process that guarantees purity and a superior quality butter.
For full details on shea butter facts and indications for use, click here .

The Shea Butter Tree

The Shea Tree is a sacred tree from the Sahel region in Africa. It can live for several hundred years. It still grows only in the wild bush for it is very difficult to cultivate. It is a tree that is traditionally worshipped because it is the source of a vegetable butter that is one of the rare available fats for cooking and for skin care and hair care, as well as for hydrating, protecting and massaging babies. This very resistant tree defies deserts and provides sun shelter to men and animals.

Because it plays an important ecological role in West African countries, and specifically against desertification, this ‘Sahel women’s butter tree’, as it is named, is now protected from deforestation and from intense gathering. In fact, the villagers even wait until the fruit is ripe enough and falls to the ground to then pick the fruit and appreciate the tender flesh during summertime. This fruit encloses the shea nut itself, similar to the hazelnut, but with a more oval shape, and with a thinner, easily breakable shell. In turn, the shea nut encloses the dark brown shea almond.

Traditionally, African women gather shea nuts which are transformed into a pure, pale yellow butter after a long conditioning and cooking process that still remains their secret.

The ancestral art of shea butter making

To obtain a high quality butter, the women have to go through several steps. First of all, choosing the right shea nuts ensures a better fat content in the butter. Then these sorted nuts are boiled to stop the natural process of germination and deterioration of the almonds.
The nuts are then released from their hulls and the almonds are dried in the sun. This process allows to decrease the moisture content of the almonds. Afterwards, a brief roasting completes this process of dehydration. This ends the phase of the initial treatment of the almonds.

Once dried and cooled, the shea almonds are crushed by mills to obtain a chocolate coloured paste. In some villages however, the traditional pestles are still used to crush the almonds, a process which requires an important physical effort from the women.

This paste is then introduced into a special press to extract the fat part from it, which then looks likes a sticky golden color oil. This tepid oil is filtered to remove impurities, then put into barrels, in hermetic bags or in jars. Once cooled, the shea butter takes the appearance of its final texture, slightly yellowish and slightly granular, like the butter we are familiar with.

It is interesting to note that the pressing generates an organic residue which will be used by women as plant fuel and as a source of potassium for the crafting of traditional soaps.

‘Green Gold’ for Sahelian women

Shea butter is an exceptional product, traditionally used in every day life for cooking and for skin and hair care. Shea Butter is the pride of the women of the Sahel region for it is the result of hard labour as well as a source of income that contributes to their independence and emancipation. It is for this reason that it is called ‘The green gold for the women’. It is women who exclusively produce the shea butter and exclusively trade it. Their predominance on this product is such that it goes to the extent of prohibiting men to even touch the shea tree, which would be a source of misfortune and curse, as it is told in certain cultures.

In Africa, shea butter means solidarity. Women have even founded cooperatives for production and mutual help in processing the butter. United and determined to improve their life conditions, women of these cooperatives struggle to transmit their knowledge, promote their products and take a place in their local economy.
The KARIDERM shea butter is precisely the result of a women’s cooperative, strongly implanted in Burkina Faso, and that we are proud to collaborate with since the creation of our line, many years ago.


> Find out more about our solidarity commitments .