7 DIY Body Butter Recipes For Glowing Skin - Savvy Homemade (2024)

I love a well-made body lotion; it nourishes our skin and keeps us looking younger for longer. But what about a top-quality body butter recipe? I’ve experimented with it in the past, but this week, I decided to make it my mission to become an expert.

So, below, I’ll show you, in detail, how to make body butter. I absolutely love the consistency of this recipe. It’s like slathering your body with clouds! It’s very light and scented with 3 different essential oils, I hope you enjoy it as much as I did!

Introduction

So, what actually is body butter? We’re all used to smearing body lotion on our skin, so how is this any different from that? Well, in some ways, body butter is more intensely hydrating. This is because, traditionally, body butter doesn’t contain any water and is made of all oil-based and soluble ingredients.

Because of this, body butter is perhaps the best moisturizing product for anyone who has to deal with very dry, ashy skin.

Better yet, if the thought of adding a preservative to a lotion puts you off, this is the product for you because homemade body butter doesn’t call for any preservatives at all!

About My Body Butter Recipe

So, the first DIY body butter recipe you will see below is my whipped shea butter. It’s an exceptionally light butter, almost grease-free, and scented with 3 different essential oils that will impart powerful benefits to our skin.

But keep reading, because after this I have 6 more excellent body butter recipes, I hope you enjoy them, I loved them all!

I absolutely LOVE the consistency of this DIY whipped body butter. It’s like slathering your body with clouds! Beating air into the mixture at various intervals creates tiny air pockets, giving it an exceptionally light and almost marshmallow-like consistency. It’s a lot like whisking up some whipped cream for sweet desserts!

I now use this daily, and I don’t think I’ll ever go back!

Benefits Of Body Butter

There are two main benefits of body butter. Firstly, as we’ve already said, this product type is intensely moisturizing. They are perhaps the best choice product for those with dry skin. But my absolute favorite benefit is how easy they are to make!

You don’t have to worry about achieving an emulsion, which is the hard part of whipping up your favorite lotion. In fact, if you can melt butter, you can make body butter!

Another benefit of making your own is that it’s difficult to get true body butter these days. Most of our store-bought alternatives will just be lotion in disguise. So by making your own, you know you have the real McCoy.

Homemade V Store-Bought

First of all, if you’re buying your body butter from a large brand, then it’s likely you’re not getting body butter at all. In fact, you’ll be getting a heavy emulsion that is made to look and feel like whipped body butter.

The reason big industries do this is that lotions are much cheaper to make. True body butters are made from expensive, solid oil ingredients – such as high concentrations of shea, mango, and cocoa butter.

In fact, a lotion calls for as much as 70% water. So, you think you’re slathering your body with gorgeous shea butter, but then you check the ingredients list and the first ingredient is ‘aqua’… It’s not exactly what you were expecting from an all-oil moisturizer.

But it gets even more damning when you consider that all emulsions, including the ones masquerading as body butter, need strong preservatives to prevent mold and microbial growth. Our cosmetics are already filled with parabens, silicones, and other things we would rather not want – adding another to the list might not be something you want.

Of course, we have lotion recipes on this site that require you to use a preservative. But if you’re looking for truly natural skincare, homemade body butter made without water is 100% the way to go!

Butter & Oil Substitutions

The butters and oils have been carefully chosen in order to maintain a fluffy texture to the finished product. But let’s take a look at some choices you can make with this gorgeous homemade whipped body butter.

Using anything other than refined shea butter in this recipe may give you a different texture, but you absolutely can experiment.

I’ve used mango before, which worked quite well. I’ve also tried avocado, which had a wonderfully light, fluffy feel to it but for some reason was also a little grainy (although these ‘grains’ melt very quickly when applied to the skin).

Using Coconut Oil

Using a solid oil, such as coconut, can be a little tricky here. This is because it has the chance to radically change the texture and consistency of your product.

However, coconut is a fantastic ingredient. It helps to gently moisturize very dry skin, reduces inflammation, stimulates the healing of wounds, and has some good antimicrobial action.

Therefore, you might want to include it in your homemade body butter. In order to do this, we need to think of coconut oil as liquid oil. This is because it isn’t the most stable of solid ingredients, and is prone to melting at a temperature only just above room temperature.

So, swap out no more than 20% of your liquid oil for coconut oil. Any more than this, and you’ll start noticing the product is significantly stiffer.

Using Cocoa Butter

Cocoa butter is another fantastic cosmetic ingredient you might want to use. It’s filled with lovely minerals, vitamins, and antioxidants that our skin loves.

Furthermore, it’s fantastically moisturizing, and wonderful for keeping skin looking healthy and supple all year round.

However, this butter is significantly harder than shea and so unsuitable for this method. Place a little of both kinds of butter between your fingers. Unless it’s very cold, you’ll find that shea can easily be massaged into the skin. Cocoa butter, however, cannot.

As we’re cold blending, we need a cosmetic butter that will easily be whipped at room temperature. This is, unfortunately, not something that is possible with cocoa butter. In fact, you’ll likely break your whisk trying.

However, cocoa butter can be fantastic in a body butter recipe that includes a heated phase, so that solid ingredients can first be melted down. Take a look at my unwhipped harder body butter recipe to learn how to do this.

Essential Oils & Scents

As much as we include essential oil blends as part of many of our recipes, you can actually use whatever you like!

If there’s a particular blend that you just love, your homemade body butter formulas are a great place to use them. Alternatively, you could keep things simple and make use of just one essential oil. We like to do this, and when we do we often opt for Lavender essential oil.

For a more unconventional aroma, you could decide to use fragrance oil. While they are synthetic, research shows that they’re okay for use on the body.

Fragrance oils come in all varieties, and often cover scents and smells that you can’t get in essential oil form. Blueberry muffins, leather, strawberries, licorice, and wine are but a few examples of what is available to you. You can even find imitation designer perfumes as fragrance oil blends!

While we know fragrance oils are a controversial ingredient, we wanted to empower you to use whatever you think is right for your body. Because making your own decisions is what DIY skincare is all about!

However, we will say that more research needs to be done in this area to clarify some of the long-term effects of fragrance oil use. It’s also worth noting that fragrance oils should never be used on the face.

OK, here’s my homemade whipped body butter recipe