DIY Body Butter With the Annmarie Skin Care Team

The ASC team is a motley of artists, healers, activists, and professionals. We need every kind of individual in a company like this because each person’s uniqueness has a place to shine. With all of our differences, it can be difficult to get us into the same room. But once you get us together, we’re unstoppable.

Have you ever met a group that can talk about vetiver for 25 minutes? We can. And did…

We all love skin care (obviously) and many of us are makers at heart, so we decided to spend our recent team happy hour at the office making body butter. It turned out fabulous — creamy, moisturizing , and just as good as other body care products, plus an aromatherapy treat! We decided to let you in on how we did it.

We wanted the body butter something we could use all the time — something with a creamy consistency that absorbed really well into the skin and left a lasting softness without leaving a film (skin care professionals over here). We chose several different carrier oils combination skin and butters to give it the texture and moisturizing properties that we like.

Staying true to our nature, we spent quite a long time choosing which essential oils to add to the formula. It easily filled our conversation while we blended the body butter together. We're all big fans of vetiver, which is a really important base note that's used in tons of perfume formulas. (We talk about how to properly pair vetiver in this article). While some of us favor a sweet vetiver creation (add vanilla or peru balsam) others of us favored a more woodsy result (use cedar or spruce).

First we melted together cocoa butter and shea butter.

Then we added coconut oil, jojoba, kukui nut, and macadamia nut oils to the blend and let it cool. (See the recipe below for some alternative oils you can use.)

To achieve a fluffy, whipped, creamy texture, we took turns hand-whipping the blend together—which was quite the workout—until it was the perfect consistency. We spent a lot of time pausing while we were whipping it to test it out and by the time we got it perfect, we were exhausted and covered in body butter. Note: hand whipping was fun, but if we were going to do this again, we would bring an electric mixer.

Once the butter and oil blend cooled, we added our essential oils.

DIY Body Butter Recipe

Here’s the recipe that we used. This makes a lot of body butter so if you’re just making it for yourself, it might be good to cut the recipe in half:

Ingredients:

• 1 cup extra virgin coconut oil
• 1 cup cocoa butter
• ½ cup shea butter
• ½ cup kukui nut oil (or substitute grapeseed oil)
• ¼ cup jojoba oil
• ¼ cup macadamia nut oil (or substitute avocado oil)
• About 20 drops of essential oils of your choice – our base formula had vetiver, spruce, and cedar, then we individually added other essential oils to make our own unique scent.

We all love the body butter we made and it’s fun to come into work and smell someone wearing theirs… It brings back such a fun memory of us laughing together, testing scents, and whipping the butter! It also works great after a homemade body scrub!

Do you have a favorite body butter recipe? Tell us about it!