Raw (Unrefined) Shea Butter vs. Refined Shea Butter

Not all Shea butter is the same, and the difference is not the nut. It is what happens after the nut.

Almost every Shea butter on a shelf has been refined to some degree. Ours has not. This is what that actually means, what changes along the way, and why we made the choice we made. It is not an argument that refined Shea butter is bad, because it is not.

What raw, unrefined Shea butter is

Raw Shea butter is what comes out of the nut and then stops. The nuts are gathered, boiled, dried, cracked, roasted, ground and hand-churned, and what you end up with is filtered and nothing else.

It is not white. It runs from ivory to a soft yellow, and the shade moves from batch to batch depending on the nuts and the season. It smells faintly nutty and smoky, because it was made over a wood fire. It contains its fatty acids, its vitamins A and E, and the unsaponifiable fraction, a share of plant compounds that most fats have very little of and Shea butter has a lot of.

What refining actually does

Refining is not one process. It is a set of them, and different producers use different combinations.

• Filtration. Removes particles and sediment. Every butter gets filtered, including ours.
• Bleaching. Lightens the color, usually with clay or a similar absorbent, which also takes some of the scent with it.
• Deodorizing. Steam treatment at high temperature that removes whatever smell is left.
• Solvent extraction. Used at industrial scale to get more butter out of the same nuts than pressing alone would.

The result is a butter that is creamy white, smells of almost nothing, and behaves identically from one batch to the next. That uniformity is the whole point: a manufacturer blending Shea butter into a lotion needs it to be the same every single time, and a natural product that shifts color and scent by season is a problem in that context, not a feature.

Refining changes the butter. Depending on the process, it can remove or reduce part of the naturally occurring unsaponifiable fraction, including tocopherols, sterols and triterpene compounds. These compounds are present in unrefined Shea butter and are part of what makes its composition distinctive.

The result is still a moisturizer. But it is not the same material that came out of the nut.

What that means in practice

Refined Shea butter is still Shea butter. It still has the fatty acids, it still moisturizes, and a well-made refined butter is a perfectly good ingredient. If you have a jar of it at home, you do not need to throw it out.

What changes is the color, the scent, and part of what the butter naturally carries alongside the fat. Whether that matters to you depends on what you wanted the butter for.

Why we choose unrefined

Because we want to sell the thing the women make, not a version of it that has been adjusted to be easier to work with.

That means keeping its own color, including the fact that it is not the same color every time. Its own smell, nutty and slightly smoky, which some people take a week to come around to and then miss when it is gone. And whatever it naturally contains, without having decided in advance which parts are worth keeping.

There is also a plainer reason. Refining happens in a factory somewhere else. Our butter is finished in the village by the women who made it, and it leaves the cooperative ready to sell. That keeps the work, and the value of the work, in the place it came from.

How to tell which one you have

Look at it and smell it.

Unrefined butter is ivory to yellow, smells nutty and smoky, and varies between batches. Refined butter is bright white, smells of nothing much, and is identical every time. Neither tells you the quality of what is inside. It tells you how much was done to it.

If a label says "100% pure" but the butter is snow white and odorless, it has been refined. That is not necessarily dishonest, but the two words are doing less work than they appear to.

Where we stand

We carry unrefined Shea butter only, and we said at the start that we would not change that. Ours keeps its natural color, its aroma and its naturally occurring components, and it is handcrafted by the women who own the cooperative, the way it has been made there for generations.

That is our choice and our reasoning. What is on your shelf is yours.

Read More

• What Is Shea Butter Made Of?
• How To Use Raw Shea Butter
• What Does Shea Butter Smell Like?
• How to Store Raw Shea Butter
• Why Is Our Shea Butter Still Handcrafted?

Raw Shea butter from our cooperative: Raw Shea Butter