Why is Cocoa butter so good on the skin

The Best Cocoa butter.

You can buy cocoa butter in two ways: refined or unrefined. Unrefined cocoa butter is simply cocoa butter in its raw form – before it is refined and processed. It is creamy-yellowy-beige in colour and has that wonderful chocolate-y scent. 

Refined cocoa butter is what’s left after the raw cocoa butter has been processed. The refining process strips the cocoa butter of its scent and colour (many cosmetics companies use this because it’s easier to work into recipes using fragrance and colour).

At Free Spirit Botanicals, we use only unrefined cocoa butter which we source from fair trade community co-operative projects in Ghana where the cocoa butter is harvested in a sustainable way. We believe that due to the processing to eliminate colour and scent, the “good things” (all the antioxidants, vitamins and nutrients which we looked at earlier) are also lost.

Free-radicals are small molecules formed during the body’s metabolism when energy is generated from glucose in every cell in your body. They are also formed by exposure to pollutants such as car fumes, pesticides, and tobacco smoke.

These free-radicals destroy cells, and when these are skin cells you begin to age. Your skin wrinkles and dries up, and you begin to take on the look of somebody years older than you are. They do this through a process known as oxidation (a good way to think of it is to consider how iron rusts when it oxidises), and antioxidants can prevent it. They neutralize the free-radicals, and prevent your skin cells from being destroyed.

Cocoa butter contains a number of different antioxidants which can kill-off a wide range of different free-radicals. In fact, cocoa butter contains a much higher antioxidant concentration then even blueberries and other superfoods.

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