The shea butter jar

There is a small ceramic jar on the bathroom shelf that holds about a hundred grams of unrefined shea butter at any given time. The jar is refilled, when it runs low, at a small refill shop three streets from our apartment, where the shea butter is sold by weight from a large container. The cost per refill is about four euros, and the jar lasts perhaps three months.

Most evenings, after the bath, I scoop a small amount of the butter — about the size of a chickpea — into the palm of one hand, warm it briefly between the palms until it melts to an oil, and apply it slowly to the legs, the arms, the lower belly, the shoulders. The application takes about three minutes. The body, by the end of three minutes, has been touched gently and is faintly perfumed with the slight nutty smell of unrefined shea.

What this has replaced

Every body lotion, body butter, body oil, and body moisturiser I used to buy. The unrefined shea, applied slowly to slightly damp skin after the bath, does everything that the various branded products did, for a tiny fraction of the cost, with one ingredient and no packaging beyond the small ceramic jar.

The skin, after two years of this single-ingredient practice, is in noticeably better shape than it was when I was using the branded products. The skin is more even in tone, more supple, less prone to the small winter dryness that I had treated as inevitable. The single best skincare ingredient I have ever used costs four euros for three months' supply, and it has been sitting on shop shelves for most of human history.

If you have been buying body moisturisers, try replacing them with unrefined shea butter for a month. The performance is, in my own experience, better than anything else I have used. The cost is less than any branded product. The packaging is minimal. The skin will, after a month, have stopped asking for anything else.