Making your own body butters from scratch is super fun and a great newbie-friendly DIY. Unfortunately, from greasiness to graininess, there’s a lot that can go wrong when you’re trying to whip up the body butter of your dreams.

Over the years I’ve learned the hard way how even the most beautiful ingredients can make pretty darn awful body butters if you make some really common (and avoidable) mistakes. So today I’m going to share the top six mistakes that are sabotaging your DIY body butters—and how to fix them!

Pssst… I shared a sort of “part 1” back in 2022 with six different mistakes—check that out here.

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What is body butter?

Before diving into these common mistakes, let’s clarify what body butter actually is. Body butters are anhydrous moisturizers that are mostly made of butters, like shea or mango, along with other fatty ingredients like liquid oils. They can be solid and balmy, soft and scoopy, or moulded into a bar.

Unlike lotions and creams, body butters are anhydrous, meaning they do not contain any water. Emulsified body butters are a thing, too, but that’s not what we’re talking about in this post.

Mistake 1

Too-greasy body butters are probably the number one complaint I see about DIY body butters. Thankfully there are lots of formulation fixes for greasy butters, but in this post I want to share a really quick non-formulation fix because sometimes, it’s not the formulation’s fault.

Let’s go back in time to 2010, when I made my very first body butter. I’d fallen in love with shea butter at the St Lawrence Market in Toronto a few months earlier, and I had a burgeoning collection of ingredients: shea butter, cocoa butter, jojoba oil, beeswax, and a couple essential oils. I followed a recipe I found online and made a ginormous batch of whipped body butter that was mostly shea butter and cocoa butter. It was luscious, whippy, and decadent; I filled a stylish 17oz glass jar with it and dug in.

And hooo boy, was it ever greasy. To be fair, of course, it was a jar of pure fat—and rich fats at that—but I was partially to blame.

This was my first experience with anhydrous body butter. Up until then I’d only ever used emulsified lotions and creams, so I was (understandably, I think!) applying the body butter as if it was a lotion.

But here’s the thing: body butters are super concentrated. They’ve usually got at least five times more fat in them than a lotion, AND often use richer stuff like shea butter instead of lighter esters and liquid oils. So when I used the same amount of body butter as I would lotion, I was massively overdoing it, and it really was no wonder it left me feeling like a buttered potato.

The fix? It’s really easy: just get used to using less when you moisturize with body butter. You can always go back for more!

If you find it hard to restrain yourself (or if you’re making body butter as gifts for people who might apply it like a lotion), try adjusting the formulation to make it a bit harder by trading ~2% of the butter for a wax or fatty thickener (stearic acid would be my first choice). This has two benefits: First—it’s more difficult to scoop out too much at once and accidentally over-do it. And second—it’ll slow the melting speed so the butter doesn’t go from soft solid to oily liquid in an instant, giving the butter more of a “buttery” feel on the skin rather than an oily, greasy one.

Learn more: Why is my body butter greasy?

Mistake 2

This next mistake is another one I made quite a few times as a newbie body butter creator and it was really frustrating. One of the first products I was trying to re-create was L’Occitane’s Lavender Hand Cream, which boasted that it was “enriched with shea butter” and smelled deliciously of lavender. I was obsessed—especially with the scent.

I already had a very large amount of raw shea butter that I’d purchased from a small shop in Toronto’s Kensington Market (having finished the St Lawrence Market stuff months earlier), so I just needed some lavender essential oil. In order to make sure I was getting the right stuff I trekked on the subway to a L’Occitane shop and purchased a bottle of the lavender essential oil. I then set about blending my lovely raw shea butter and beautiful new lavender essential oil, but no matter what I did—and no matter how much lavender essential oil I used—it still smelled nothing like the L’Occitane product. Instead of smelling sweet, lavendery, soft, and powdery it smelled, well… smokey, with a hint of lavender. Smokey?

Looking back on this with over a decade of experience under my belt I can easily identify a lot of places where I went wrong (so many, goodness), but one of them is a lesson that translates really well to body butters: if an ingredient smells like something, that smell is probably going to come through in your final products—especially if you use a lot of it.

The raw shea butter I was using as the base of my blends smelled like, well—raw shea butter. Smokey, nutty, and quite strongly so. Adding lavender essential oil did nothing to mask this scent, it just made a product that smelled smoky, nutty, and lavender-y.

Learn more: 5 ingredients that will make your formulations smell awful

So what’s the fix? If you’re not a fan of the natural scent of a raw butter, choose refined butters instead. They’re practically scentless, giving you a blank scent canvas for your creations. If you love raw butters and want to use them, embrace the scent and work with it rather than trying to smother it. For exampled—I think the smokey, nutty scent of shea butter pairs nicely with brighter scents like grapefruit and cardamom.

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Mistake 3

Our third mistake is a bit “softer” than the first two, though it’s really common.

As you make more and more body butters and start sharing them with your friends and family you might start wondering “Why is my body butter not as light as I want it to be?” and “Why are my body butters melting when I mail them to my friends?”

I think we can (at least partially) attribute this to anhydrous body butters being a relatively rare mass-market product. If you purchase a moisturizer at the drug store it’s probably going to be emulsified, or it’s going to be more of a balm (like a lip balm) and contain a lot more hardeners than a soft, scoopy body butter does. This means that there’s a decent chance your first experiences with an anhydrous body butter are at home, in your own kitchen—and you might not fully appreciate how your decadent creations are different from the emulsified moisturizers you’ve purchased at the store.

As gorgeous as anhydrous body butters are, they’ve got some key limitations that are just unavoidable. A big one is thermal stability. Because anhydrous body butters are a blend of fats designed to melt on the skin when you apply them, body butters just aren’t as stable as lotions when it comes to temperature fluctuations. They will melt if they get too warm (which can make them really hard to ship in the summer), and they’ll get hard and crumbly if they get too cold.

Learn more: Why is my body butter melting?

When it comes to how light they feel on the skin, an anhydrous body butter is never going to feel as light on the skin as a lotion or emulsified body butter, no matter how many greasiness-reducing strategies you use. That’s not a bad thing—it’s just different. It makes body butters a brilliant choice for skin that needs a lot of nourishment, not the ideal moisturizer if you’re handling lots of paper and don’t want to leave greasy fingerprints on every page.

Understanding what body butter can—and can’t—do is essential so you can have realistic expectations… and maybe choose to make a different sort of product in situations where a body butter won’t shine or just isn’t what you want.

Want to try your hand at an emulsified body butter? Easy Emulsified Body Butter

Mistake 4

Our next mistake can lead to body butters that feel sandy or grainy before you’re even done making them, which is obviously super frustrating! Here’s how that happens:

One of my favourite ways to make a whipped body butter is to cold process it—skipping the melting step and just whipping everything together at room temperature like I’m making cookies. This avoids one big place butters can go grainy (the melting step) and saves time, but it can be a bit of a double-edged sword.

Because we aren’t melting the butters, if your buttery ingredients aren’t smooth when you start, they’re not going to be smooth in the finished body butter. That’s why it’s essential that you pinch off a bit of each butter and rub it between your fingers to ensure it is smooth BEFORE you turn it into a cold processed body butter.

Learn how to make a cold processed whipped shea butter: DIY Whipped Shea Butter: 3 Ways

If it’s silky smooth you’re good to go—but if it feels grainy or mealy, you’ll need to save that butter for a formulation where it’ll be melted first so those lumps get smoothed out (this one is great).

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Mistake 5

This is a continuation of our previous mistake—WHY does your butter feel grainy?

Grainy body butters are a problem that drives DIYers crazy, but new makers often don’t know why it happens. If we don’t understand why our butters go grainy, we can’t stop it from happening, and that’s why I’m calling that (not knowing why it happens) mistake #5. So let’s get into the science behind it!

The hard little bits that you feel in a grainy body butter are the solid, saturated fats from your butters. They SHOULD be distributed smoothly throughout the body butter, but when butters melt and then cool improperly, these saturated fats solidify before everything else does, and we get a grainy, uneven butter.

Unfortunately, there’s quite a few ways for a butter to melt and then cool down the wrong way! If you’ve ever gotten a grainy, mealy butter in the mail, it might’ve melted in the delivery truck and then re-solidified in the air conditioned post office. If you’ve made a formulation and skipped the “trace” step—or even just poured it at the wrong level of trace—that can make for a grainy body butter. And if your finished body butter is exposed to temperature fluctuations, be it from changing seasons or accidentally getting left in a hot car, that can also take it from silky smooth to sad and lumpy.

So, how do we fix this?

• If you’ve made a formulation that is grainy as soon as it sets up, gently re-melt it and re-do the cooling part, trying a thicker or thinner trace, or a freezer or fridge set instead of a counter set.
• Make sure you’re not storing your finished body butters somewhere they’ll be exposed to swings in temperatures, like on top of a radiator or in your pocket.
• If your body butters are changing with the seasons, try making smaller batches. This way, you can use it up before winter turns to summer and warmer temperatures mess with your butter.
• If you live somewhere with hot summers, consider only ordering butters during the cooler part of the year as much as possible.

Learn even more: Why is my body butter grainy?

Mistake 6

Have you ever opened a jar of DIY body butter a few weeks or months after you made it, only to find it has split into a runny liquid layer on the bottom with a thick, chunky layer floating on top? What happened to your jar of creamy goodness?

Maybe you turned to Google for help, and your search for “why is my body butter splitting?” spat out a bunch of results about splitting emulsions… but your anhydrous body butter isn’t an emulsion. Separation in anhydrous body butters doesn’t occur for the same reason lotions & creams split, so those results didn’t help.

Emulsified lotions & creams separate when the the emulsion fails. This might be due to inadequate blending, not using an emulsifier, conflicts between ingredients, microbial spoilage, improper pH, or not stabilizing the emulsion properly—but none of these reasons will explain why an anhydrous body butter is separating.

In anhydrous body butters, separation is actually a symptom of a different problem that we’ve already talked about: melting. If you’re seeing different layers in your body butter, it is (or was) too warm. Some (or all of it) melted—a little or a lot—and re-arranged itself. If you’ve got a solid part and a liquid part that means it has cooled down enough for some of the higher-melting-point fatty acids to re-solidify, but not enough for the lower-melting-point fatty acids to do so.

There are two solutions for a separating body butter—which one you choose depends on why your body butter melted.

If your body butter melted because it was accidentally exposed to abnormally high temperatures (like left in a hot car), you can gently re-melt it in a water bath and re-cool it, following the same method you did when you first made it.

However, if separation is a recurring issue—or if a new formulation never sets up for you the way it was supposed to—you’ll need to modify the formulation to raise its melting point. If you live somewhere quite hot and your butters are liquifying, incorporating 1–5% beeswax or stearic acid can really help. They both have higher melting points than any butter, so they’ll raise the melting point of your body butter quite a bit, making it more stable in higher temperatures.

If your body butter is just a little too soft, adding beeswax or stearic acid is likely overkill and will make your body butter too hard. Instead, you’ll want to shift the liquid/solid balance of the formulation to use more solid ingredients (butters) and fewer liquid ones (oils). A 5% shift (5% more butter/5% less oil) can be surprisingly effective!

See this shift in action: Perfectly Pillowy Whipped Shea Butter

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