Our Daily Green recently received some products to try from the the folks over at Nourish Organic, a cosmetics company based in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania. Our package included the Nourish Organic Raw Shea Butter and the Nourish Organic Body Wash in Lavender Mint.
While both products are manufactured in cruelty free, chemical free, concern free ways, we want to focus on Shea butter as a beauty treatment. We have been extremely impressed with this simple, yet extremely effective moisturizer and wanted to learn more about the raw material.
Shea butter is derived from the Shea tree, which grows wild in Africa and requires no water or chemicals to grow. The only real threat to this resource is that the Shea tree is used for the production of charcoal and firewood. It is predominantly grown in the West African nations of Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Republic of Central Africa, Democratic Republic of Congo, Cote D'Ivoire, Chad, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Togo and Uganda.
The Shea butter industry is mainly driven by the work of women across West Africa. Women collect the Shea nuts, extract the butter and sell the refined product. According to Brenda Chalfin's book Shea Butter Republic, shea has gone from a commodity for the indigenous people of Africa to a postindustrial world luxury. In Ghana and Burkina Faso there are a million Shea butter producers. Shea butter production requires lots of manual work, since machines are not readily available for the women producing Shea. The labor is mostly all done manually with little to no technology.
Shea is considered a "tree of life" for several reasons, from the healing properties of the butter to the economic opportunities it provides for millions in West Africa.
We absolutely loved the product from Nourish Organic and highly recommend it to our readers. At this time, through the end of the May, they are offering a buy one, get one free offer exclusively through their online shopping store.
Disclosure: Our Daily Green received a complimentary 5.5 oz jar of Nourish Organic raw shea butter. We were so impressed by the product that we were inspired to learn more, which prompted today's post.
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