How This One Ingredient Can Transform Your Skin

If you’re not familiar with cocoa butter your first thought when hearing those words might be that we are referring to some decadent chocolate dessert, but think again!   Though related to the chocolate we eat in a roundabout way, this natural product has many great benefits for your skin.

What Is Cocoa Butter?

Cocoa butter comes from the cacao bean (pronounced ka-kow)  which is found inside the cocoa pod that grows on the cacao tree.

How Cocoa Butter Benefits to Skin

• Antioxidants: Cocoa butter is high in antioxidants which help fight off free radical damage to the skin. Free radicals can cause skin aging, dark patches, and dull skin.  Protecting your skin from free radical damage is a must if you want healthy and younger-looking skin.  This skin care ingredient is also anti-inflammatory which makes cocoa butter an anti-aging skin care ingredient as well.

• Stretch Mark Reducer: There are many women who claim that the regular use of cocoa butter was what kept stretch marks away while they were pregnant. We’re not entirely convinced anything can keep stretch marks away, but you’ll find many anti-stretch mark cocoa butter products to choose from. In fact, People also say that cocoa butter helps to heal scars.                                                                                —Deep Hydration: Cocoa butter is high in fatty acids and hydrates the skin deeply, making it a wonderful addition to body moisturizers and lip balms.  It contains oleic acid, palmitic acid, and stearic acid all of which nourish the skin deeply.
• Sensitive Skin Healer: Again, no guarantees, but cocoa butter has been noted to help skin irritations such as eczema and dermatitis.
• Unrefined: Creamy yellow in color, unrefined cocoa butter is simply cocoa butter in its rawest form. It’s easy to find organic raw unrefined cocoa butter and all of the above-mentioned skin care benefits naturally come with the unrefined product.  It smells pretty strongly of chocolate, which some cosmetics manufacturers feel masks the scent of the fragrance they add to their products while other people may really ​like that scent.