All About My Custom Massage Butter
I’ve recently had some clients ask about my custom massage butter and what I put in it, so I thought I’d explain it in a little more detail in a post.
In massage school, we used Biotone-branded lotions and creams, and they dried out my skin horribly. The wellness spa I worked at as a receptionist and housekeeper during school used a massage cream called Massage FX, and it seemed to work better than Biotone, so when I graduated, I bought Massage FX cream to use at first. After only a few months, my hands were almost as dried out as when I was using Biotone in school. I was on the hunt for another alternative.
Enter my friend and colleague, Ron. I met Ron through a networking group that we were both a part of, and we decided to trade massage services for a while. He used raw shea butter for massage emollient, and I was intrigued. I was able to try using his raw shea butter one day, and I instantly fell in love.
Shea nuts
Shea butter is a natural butter made from shea tree nuts (pictured above). The fact that the butter is all natural appealed to me, and the resulting product had amazing glide on the skin while lasting a long time. I found that I didn’t need to use as much product or reapply butter to the same body part I was working on once I got started like I had with the various massage creams I tried. The only complaint I had at first was that raw shea butter does have a bit of an earthy scent to it, and some clients just weren’t that into the scent. Beyond that, I did have two consecutive orders of shea butter arrive already rancid, and I couldn’t use it and had to return it.
My First Massage Butter
Seeing how easily shea butter could turn rancid, I started exploring other alternatives, and my research took me down a rabbit hole of YouTube videos on body butter recipes. I wasn’t really looking to turn my kitchen into a chemistry lab, and I finally found a video that talked about fully anhydrous (without water) body butters. I learned that if you only use oil-based ingredients, you don’t have to do anything too special. Just gently melt the ingredients together in a double-boiler, use an antioxidant ingredient to help extend the oil shelf life and prevent early rancidity, let set to cool, and whip for texture. Boom. Done!
Body butter
I mixed together mango butter, shea butter, cocoa butter, coconut oil, jojoba oil, arnica oil, and vitamin E T50 (my chosen antioxidant) to form a body butter that had great slip to begin with, and lasted long enough on the skin to have decent grip once I’d warmed up the tissue and was ready for deeper work.
A normal person would think I stopped there. And for a while, I did. I was really happy with this body butter and it was easy to make. But my ADHD won’t let me leave well enough alone…
Making Magnesium Massage Butter
Another massage therapist friend of mine gave me a peppermint magnesium roller for Christmas. I used it on my partner and then on myself with decent results. It helped relax tense muscles, and the peppermint had the added benefit of helping with headaches. I already used epsom salt baths to help with self care and physical recovery, and epsom salt is magnesium sulfate. I’d also seen topical magnesium as well as lotions and creams with magnesium in them, so I thought about putting magnesium in my body butter, and back down the research rabbit hole I went.
This time, if I wanted to add magnesium to my massage butter, I was going to have to temporarily turn my kitchen into a chemistry lab. It turns out that magnesium oil is not actually an oil; it’s magnesium chloride dissolved in water. It’s called magnesium oil because it feels oily. So if I wanted to add magnesium to my butter, I would have to make an emulsion. Trying to figure out how to make an emulsion from scratch using my previous recipe as a starting point proved to be more difficult than I expected.
I found plenty of YouTube how-to videos and online recipes for magnesium body butters, but I was hard-pressed to find any explanation as to how to formulate an emulsion from scratch. I even tried using ChatGPT to help me formulate something, but AI apparently can’t do basic math and kept making really simple errors, so I didn’t trust the formulation I was creating.
Finally, I joined a body butter makers Facebook group and asked around for resources in there. Someone posted a link to a calculator that would help me create a successful emulsion using the ingredients I entered, and it was called “Lotion Math.” I figured out what kind of emulsion I wanted, input my ingredients and amounts, and the calculator even suggested which emulsifiers to choose from based on my other ingredients and the kind of emulsion.
Emulsion Details
After figuring out the math and chemistry part of it, I had to actually try it out. There are essentially three phases to an emulsion: the water phase, the oil phase, and the cool-down phase. The water and oil phases are heated separately (I used separate wide-mouth mason jars) but at the same time to around the same temperature (I usually go for around 165 degrees Fahrenheit).
Then, depending on the type of emulsion (oil in water or water in oil), either the oil phase is added to the water phase during mixing, or the water phase is added to the oil phase during mixing. My understanding is that you add the lesser phase to the greater phase, or, to put it another way, the phase that has the emulsifier included in it before heating is the phase that is being added to. An oil in water (O/W) emulsion has more water-based ingredients than oil-based, and the emulsifier is helping the oil molecules “stick” to the water molecules. Conversely, a water in oil emulsion (W/O) has more oil-based ingredients than water-based, and the emulsifier is helping the water molecules to join up with the oil ones.
Final Results
I think I got extremely lucky. My first try was a success, and it was perfect. The resulting massage butter glides on silky smooth, and there’s just enough magnesium in the formulation that it has excellent drag. My clients love it, and I get compliments on my massage butter regularly.
