When first starting House of Aja, it was always my goal to find a way to help women cope better with their period every month. This idea needed individual essential oils known to be used during one's cycle to ease PMS symptoms. The other part was solidifying whether to make a body oil or body butter. I had been looking at the body butter market for a few months. My son and I tried out products here and there to see what we could do differently. My son and I spent a month making and adjusting our recipe. Reading customer reviews of other whipped butter products showed what people wanted to get out of them. That work developed into a new product released last month, our mango & avocado whipped body butter.
Allow me to share the process taken to formulate and test what I thought to be the perfect body butter for everyone. I had to create a moisturizer for combination and dry skin. This body cream would have to last all day through all conditions. Light enough to be used as a face moisturizer. You'll find out why I chose raw mango and avocado butter for this product. Why adding essential oils related to PMS symptoms was a good idea. Plus everything I figured out while testing different formulas until I got it right. Maybe some of the lessons I've learned will help you with your decision to switch to a natural skin moisturizer like ours.
Choosing the best online supplier
My resource became a company based out of Canada but had a distribution warehouse set up on the east coast of the U.S. That alone helped cut the shipping time for me to receive my supplies. My choice of supplier was a well-established aromatics company. Essential and carrier oils are batch tested and come with a safety date sheet. I knew I could trust that my supplies were coming from a premium company, which made me secure that the final product I would be making would carry the same high quality. Their website stated, "Meticulous tests, documentation, and certifications must be available for every product in our portfolio." So remember, first find yourself a premium supplier who tests their oils.
Choosing which raw butter to use
Using cocoa butter or shea butter was not an option for our recipe. Nothing against using them, but it is just that they were what we all grew up knowing and using. Just like other butter, it contains fatty acids. I had a much-needed urge to find butter that most consumers hardly used. Ones that could open the mind to explore what wasn't just in our faces. What I needed to do first was locate a great distributor for my raw materials. Everything that says "natural" or "organic" doesn't always mean the supplies are 100% that. I had noticed where other small business owners were buying their supplies. Amazon came up a lot. I've always used the platform for some of my marketing and hardware supplies without hesitation. Their brand stands out from other online stores, and their customer service is fantastic! I couldn't see purchasing raw materials from a distributor of a distributor. I wanted it all from an official source, which has always been key to my business brand.
Mango vs avocado vs shea butter
With my mindset on how I felt about shea and cocoa butter, my choices narrowed to mango and avocado butter. Rule #1 was that the butter had to be light. Much lighter than shea butter, mango and avocado butter last longer at room temperature than the latter. Our skin can absorb the moisturizer faster, stopping it from clogging pores. Hence, making it a much better product than what we get off our store shelves.
Mango butter is an exceptional moisturizer and may help soften your skin. It contains both vitamin A and vitamin C in its health properties. Vitamin A an antioxidant that stimulates the skin's natural renewal process. This process encourages the skin to produce healthy skin cells, improving the skin's elasticity.
Avocado butter has excellent penetrating properties. Its extracted from the avocado fruit and used in hair for its moisturizer sealing properties while helping the hair stay softer longer. I figured this butter would be perfect for people with skin irritations, dry skin and acne.
Shea butter is heavier than mango and avocado butter. Ideal for all skin conditions, it posses linoleic, palmitic, stearic, and oleic fatty acids, ingredients that balance oils on your skin. It would have probably worked well with our body butter formula. What it possesed that I wasn't looking for was its smell. Unlike both mango and avocado butter, shea butter isn't odorless.
So there I was, now having a direction for 2 of the main ingredients. Now it was time to put the rest of the body butter recipe together....