Create Yummy Olive Oil Body Butters

When you think olive oil you usually think of cooking or baking, but olive oil is a great ingredient for other wonderful concoctions you can make at home too. Olive oil is a great ingredient for body butter!

Body butter is fun to make, it’s easy, takes easily sourced ingredients, it’s fast, and the finished product smells so good. You also know the body butter you are making has no harmful ingredients and is good enough to eat.

Body Butter Ingredients

Your imagination is really your only barrier to what ingredients you put into your body butter recipe. I tell people to think of what aromas they like the best, what smells are they drawn to. For some people it’s lavender others it’s orange. Usually, you choose your fragrance based on what smells good to you plus what you want your body butter to be–soothing, energizing, or recuperative.

The basic ingredients that go into a great body butter are olive oil, shea butter, cocoa butter, and coconut oil. All these ingredients are available at a natural food store or online. Of course, you would use Tastealotta olive oil, because oil doesn’t get better than Tastealotta.

Essential Oils for Body Butter

So now comes the fun part, what essential oils do you want to add to your body butter? There are so many choices, but we give you some examples of essential oil combinations and their benefits below:

• Bergamot: Relaxation
• Cedarwood: Calming, stress relief, restful sleep, clears sinuses
• Chamomile: Reduces stress
• Clary Sage: Relaxation
• Geranium: Relaxation, calming, improves mood
• Grapefruit: Refreshing
• Lavender: Stress & promotes good sleep
• Lemon: Improves concentration and benefits mood
• Lime: Uplifting, revitalizing
• Patchouli: Relaxation
• Peppermint: Reduces headaches, boost alertness, clears sinuses
• Rosemary: Increases focus
• Sweet Orange: Reduces anxiety
• Tangerine: Energizing, balancing
• Ylang-ylang: Decreases stress

The idea is to pick a couple of scents of essential oils and their benefits that you would like to achieve with your body butter and try them in your next batch. You can always split up a batch before you add your essential oils and try out a few different combinations.

Body Butter Containers

What makes a good body butter container? Think wide mouth jars, they are the easiest to fill. People use Mason jars, but my personal favorite is resealable glass jars with hinged glass lids. Mason jars you can buy at your grocery store, but the hinged lid jars usually you need to buy online. If you want to go with a designer look the tulip jars with glass lids available online are beautiful and are one of my favorites!

Body Butter Equipment

You can go low-tech, but my favorite tool for making handmade body butter is my Kitchen Aid mixer. A counter-top mixer is strong enough to whip up lots of great smelling body butter quickly. A hand mixer will do, but you need to make sure it can take the thick consistency. If you hand-mixer that can handle shortbread dough, it can handle body butter just fine.

The only other tools you need other than the ingredients then are a mixer, a large metal bowl, a wire whisk, a double boiler-see hints if you don’t have one, and a strong spatula.

Basic Body Butter Recipe

Ingredients:

• 1 cup olive oil
• 1 cup shea butter, you can substitute avocado butter if your skin is extremely dry
• 1 cup cocoa butter
• 1 cup coconut oil, hemp oil or jojoba oil can be substituted for coconut oil. Whereas rosehip oil can be used in place of coconut oil or as additional coconut oil you are looking for scar reducing properties. If adding another oil you would reduce the coconut oil by half.

Many people just use two ingredients, such as shea butter and olive oil, but having tried lots of combinations the one above produces stand-out results.

Directions:

1. This is the easy part, add all oils and butters together in a double boiler. If you don’t have a double boiler you can use a metal mixing bowl over a pan of boiling water.
2. Heat your mixture until melted, mixing with a wire whisk, and put the blended mixture in the refrigerator for about an hour to cool become firm.
3. Using a hand-mixer or countertop mixer whip the cooled mixture until fluffy and creamy.
4. Now it’s time to add your choice of essential oils, usually, 10-20 drops per batch are sufficient. Remember you can always add more, you can’t subtract!
5. Spoon your body butter into the jars you have chosen. The mixture will firm up with storage. Clamp the lid and you may either store it on the countertop or in the refrigerator when the weather is warmer for safe storage.

The recipe above makes approximately 4 1/2 cups of body butter, if you wish to make smaller batches for mixing ease and also to be able to add different essential oils you can half the recipe. We have so many friends that enjoy the body butters we make that we tend to go large when we make a batch. Have fun creating homemade body butters and remember to use Tastealotta olive oil!