It's SHEA Beautiful!

One of my favorite Ingredients has ALWAYS been Shea Butter. So much so that I created a Treasury on Etsy chocked filled with Shea Butter Goodies!

Many people nowadays have heard of Shea Butter. It's even in baby wipes now! To the big companies, it's a marketing ingredient. To me, I use it because of it many wonderful properties.

Shea Butter is a solid fatty oil made from the nuts of Karite Nut Trees that grow in the savannah regions of Africa. Shea Butter is often called "women's gold," because the extraction of the butter gives employment to hundreds of thousands of rural African women. Shea butter is also so non-toxic and beneficial that is used in foods and cooking as well as soaps and beauty products.

Shea Butter is said to have the following qualities and more:

• Creates a soft pleasant skin sensation
• Protects the skin from drying out
• Accelerates the Healing of superficial skin wounds and skin irritation
• Well tolerated by the skin

It also has been shown to provide relief from the following:

• Dry Skin (face & body)
• Skin Cracks
• Shaving Bumps
• Eczema
• Loss of Skin Elasticity
• Wrinkles & Blemishes
• Stretch Marks During Pregnancy
• Relief of Rheumatism
• Eases Muscle and Joint Pain

It only has one major caution... If you are allergic to Latex, please do a skin patch test first.

When shopping for products with Shea Butter, keep one major thing in mind, the placement of the Shea Butter on the Ingredient List. All ingredients are listed in descending order, meaning that the more there is of a certain ingredient, the closer to the top it'll be listed. You want Shea Butter to be as close to the top as possible! One of my biggest pet peeves is when a company markets their product as being so great because it contains Shea Butter, only to find out that the amount it contains is so pathetically small they may as well have not bothered including it! Unfortunately it happens all too often. So if you haven't gotten into the habit of reading labels, don't you think it's time to learn what it is you're putting on your body?