What Is The basic Formula for A Whipped Hair Butter?

The basic formula is: 70 to 80% solid butter plus 20 to 30% liquid oil.

After that you just need to choose which butters and oils you want to have in your whipped butter. In all of my DIY Whipped Hair Butter Recipes I advance this basic formula by:

• Adding a fragrance or essential oils
  
• Adding colour (I prefer natural colours, e.g. if you use carrot tissue oils you get a yellow whipped butter like you see in the second image)
  
• Using more than one butter (I love love love mixing butters)
  
• Using more than one oil
  
• Using 1% vitamin E oil (tocopherol). As an antioxidant it extends the life of your whipped butter; that said, if you will use your butter within six months it's not necessary, just add an extra 1% of oil.
  
• Using waxes

Using Hard Butters

If you are going to use just one butter, I have a warning don't use any of the hard butters because that whipped butter is going to be far too hard. Hard butters include cocoa, illipe, kokum, and sal a.k.a shorea. 

If you must use one of those hard butters then make it no more than 15-25% of the recipe and combine it with another softer butter. Shea butter and mango butter are both soft but the more exotic kukui is super soft. Kukui butter is actually hydrogenated kukui oil.

Alternatively, you can go 60% hard butter plus 40% oil and see how that goes. In the reference section at the bottom of this blog check out Garden of Wisdom for info on whether a butter is hard or soft plus info on shelf life etc.

If you don't have all the oils and butters that I use in my DIY Whipped Butter Recipes you can substitute with another oil or butter. 

• Can You Substitute One Oil Or Butter With Another In A Whipped Butter Recipe?

You can add any oil soluble ingredients to a whipped butter but you cannot add water soluble ingredients. That would require an emulsifier and I personally don't want to go that advanced with my whipped butters, it's not worth the effort!

WAXES: I use waxes in some of the softer whipped butter recipes to firm them up a little and to increase sealing power. If you don't have a wax that I am using then use another wax instead. Use more butter or oil if you remove the wax from the recipe.

So the method is:

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1. Set up a bain marie (a.k.a. a double boiler).
   
2. Place the hardest butter or wax into it.
   
3. Whilst the hard butters and waxes are dissolving place the remaining ingredients (soft butters, oils and fragrance / essential oil) into a deep and narrow plastic container, this is the container you’ll use to blend the lot.
   
4. When the ingredients in the bain marie are just soft, remove them from the heat, allow them to cool but not to harden then scoop them into the container that contains the other ingredients.
   
5. Using a hand-held blender with only one of the attachments on it, blend the ingredients until you get the desired consistency.
   
6. Scoop the finished product into any container (glass/plastic/aluminium). 

You can use a spoon or a cake-decorating piping tube to place your whipped butter in the jar.

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You might also like: 

• Neno Natural's DIY Hair Recipes

Ref: Garden Of Wisdom - Butters page

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