Shea butter is pressed from karité nuts in the West African savanna. It has been used for thousands of years to nourish skin. This piece records the tree, the nut, and how Lê Mai uses it.
The karité tree and the harvest
Karité (Vitellaria paradoxa) grows naturally in the savanna belt stretching from Senegal through Mali, Burkina Faso, Ghana, to Sudan. Trees stand 10-15 metres tall, living up to 200 years. There are no commercial karité plantations.
Harvest runs from May to August each year. Karité fruit falls to the ground; harvesters gather it. Each tree yields 15-20kg of fresh fruit annually. A community needs three generations of women to harvest and process enough for one season.
Traditional pressing in West Africa
Fresh fruit is split to extract the nuts. Nuts are sun-dried, lightly roasted over a charcoal fire. Then pounded in wooden mortars into a creamy paste.
The paste is mixed with warm water and beaten by hand continuously for hours. The butter slowly separates from the water, rising as a pale yellow layer. The butter is skimmed off, simmered to remove remaining water, then set.
One kilogram of dried nuts yields about 400-500 grams of raw shea butter. The traditional process is still followed in many communities, providing the main income for West African women.
Unrefined versus refined
Unrefined shea keeps its natural cream-yellow colour, the soft roasted-nut scent, and retains the natural phenols and tocopherols.
Refined shea has been processed with hexane or bleached, resulting in white, odourless butter that mixes easily into mass-market cosmetics. Most natural antioxidants are lost.
Lê Mai uses only unrefined shea, or lightly clay-refined shea, never chemically refined.
Stearic, oleic, linoleic acids
The fatty acid profile of shea: stearic 35-45%, oleic 40-55%, linoleic 3-8%, palmitic 3-7%.
The high stearic ratio is what makes shea solid at room temperatures below 30°C. Stearic is also the fatty acid that forms a seal on skin, preventing moisture loss.
Oleic is the main conditioning component, absorbing through the epidermis. Linoleic is less but important for the skin's lipid barrier. The combination makes shea both stay on skin and nourish it.
Shea in cold process soap
In cold process formulas, shea typically makes up 5-15% of total oils. Above 15% the bar becomes too soft. Below 5% the conditioning is not felt.
When saponified, the stearic and palmitic in shea create hardness in the bar. The oleic and linoleic do not fully saponify, remaining in the bar as superfat, conditioning skin during use.
Shea in body butter
Lê Mai body butter uses 60-70% unrefined shea by weight, combined with jojoba and a touch of beeswax to hold structure.
The blend is melted at 50°C, mixed evenly, cooled to 30°C, then whipped until it reaches a cream-like whipped structure. Applied to skin, the butter melts immediately at body temperature 36°C, leaving a moisturising layer that lasts 6-8 hours.
A karité tree. A nut. A process thousands of years old.
Shea comes from the hands of women in Burkina Faso. To the skin of Lê Mai users. Not through a chemical plant.