These days, you'll find shea butter everywhere from body creams and lotions to hair products, lip balms, and soaps. It's often presented as a special natural ingredient or the latest must-have for dry skin.
But for me, shea butter was never a trend.
Growing up in Ghana, shea butter was simply something I knew. It was familiar, practical, and used long before I understood anything about fatty acids, emollients, skin barriers, or cosmetic formulation.
Years later, when I began studying skincare formulation, I found myself looking at this familiar ingredient through completely different eyes.
I understood not only that shea butter worked beautifully for dry skin, but also why.
And that made me appreciate it even more.
Before the Jar, There Is a Shea Tree
When we purchase a beautifully packaged jar of shea butter, it's easy to forget where it actually begins.
Shea butter comes from the kernels of the fruit of the shea tree, which grows naturally across the shea belt of sub-Saharan Africa, including northern Ghana.
The fruit falls from the tree and is traditionally gathered during the harvest season. In many shea-producing communities, women are deeply involved in collecting and processing the shea nuts.
And turning those nuts into the creamy butter we recognize takes work.
The traditional process can involve sorting and preparing the nuts, crushing them, roasting them, grinding them into a paste, working that paste with water, separating the fat, heating it and filtering it.
It takes time, experience and skill.
That is something I believe deserves to be remembered when we talk about shea butter.
The Women Behind Shea Butter
One of the things I want to highlight through Divergent Glow is that there are real people behind our ingredients.
For generations, women in Ghana and other West African countries have carried much of the knowledge surrounding traditional shea processing.
For some women and their communities, shea is also an important source of income.
So when I think about shea butter, I don't only think about what it does for our skin.
I think about the women.
I think about the hands that gather and sort the nuts.
I think about the knowledge passed from one generation to another.
And I think about how easily all of that can disappear from the story once shea butter reaches a beauty shelf thousands of miles away.
That's why responsible sourcing and fair trade matters to me.
What Fair Trade Means to Me
As Divergent Glow grows, I want to remain thoughtful about where my ingredients come from not only what they can do in a formulation.
Fair trade, responsible sourcing, and supply-chain transparency are important conversations because the people at the beginning of the supply chain deserve to benefit from the value created from their work.
For me, sustainability isn't only about choosing recyclable packaging or using natural ingredients.
It also means asking:
Who produced this ingredient?
Where did it come from?
Were the people involved in producing it treated and compensated fairly?
Those are questions I want to continue asking as I grow my business.
And I think consumers deserve to know that there is a human story behind the ingredients they put on their skin.
Then I Became a Formulator...
This is where my relationship with shea butter changed.
I already knew shea butter.
But studying skincare formulation helped me understand it.
Shea butter contains a high proportion of fatty acids, including oleic and stearic acids, which contribute to its rich, emollient properties. In a thoughtfully designed formulation, shea butter can help soften the skin, improve the feel of rough and dry areas, and support a product's ability to reduce moisture loss from the skin.
That made so much sense to me.
Something I had known from experience now had science behind it.
And that's one of the things I enjoy most about being a formulator bringing traditional knowledge and formulation science together.
Why Shea Butter Has a Place in Divergent Glow
I don't want to put shea butter into something simply so I can say "Made with Shea Butter" on the front of the label.
Every ingredient should have a reason for being there.
When I'm developing a formula for dry, thirsty skin, I think about the entire formulation.
Where is the water coming from?
What will attract and hold water?
What will soften the skin?
What will help reduce moisture loss?
What texture do I want?
How should the skin feel five minutes after application not just the moment the product touches it?
Shea butter can be one part of answering those questions.
Sometimes I may use more of it. Sometimes less. And there may be formulations where another ingredient makes more sense.
That's formulation.
It's not about putting every beautiful ingredient into one jar. It's about choosing the right ingredients, in the right amounts, for a purpose.
Shea Butter Doesn't Have to Mean Heavy and Greasy
I think this is worth mentioning because some people hear "shea butter" and immediately picture something extremely thick and greasy.
It doesn't have to be.
How shea butter feels depends greatly on the complete formulation.
By balancing it with other emollients, botanical oils, humectants and carefully chosen ingredients, I can create a product that gives the skin the nourishment I'm looking for while still creating an enjoyable skin feel.
That's why I always say that an ingredient is only part of the story.
The formulation matters.
From Ghana to My Formulation Table
There is something very meaningful about standing at my formulation table and working with an ingredient that connects me to where I came from.
I don't see shea butter as an exotic African ingredient.
I see home.
I see an ingredient I knew before I ever thought about starting a skincare business.
I see generations of African women who understood how to make and use it long before modern beauty companies began putting it on ingredient labels.
And now I get to take that heritage, combine it with the formulation knowledge I've gained, and create something of my own.
I don't take that lightly.
More Than a Beauty Trend
Beauty trends come and go.
There's always another ingredient getting attention, another routine we're told we need, and another product promising to change everything.
Shea butter doesn't need that kind of introduction.
Its story began long before today's beauty industry discovered its value.
And for me, that's what makes it special.
It's an ingredient with history.
It's connected to women and communities.
It's connected to Ghana.
It's useful in the kinds of nourishing formulations I love creating.
And most importantly, it's part of my own story.
So when you see shea butter in a Divergent Glow formulation, I hope you see more than another ingredient on the label.
I hope you see a little of where it came from, the women behind it, the tradition it carries, and the care that goes into deciding how it belongs in the formula.
Because for me, shea butter was never a beauty trend.
It was part of the story long before Divergent Glow began. 🇬🇭
Real Ingredients. Real Care. Real Glow.