Handmade Honey Body Butter Recipe for Radiant Skin
A thick and nourishing honey body butter that you can make with a few ingredients, including cocoa butter, honey, and chamomile essential oil. It’s especially soothing and conditioning on dry skin but you can use it in your daily skincare regime as well.
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This is a simple natural skincare recipe that you can make in less than half an hour and with simple and natural ingredients. Honey body butter combines the conditioning properties of cocoa butter and shea butter with the repairing and hydrating properties of raw honey. Gently melted together with sweet almond oil, and scented with skin-soothing chamomile essential oil, it’s simple and nourishing skincare that you can easily make yourself.
Follow the instructions below to make a single pot for yourself, or several to give to friends and family. If you don’t have all of the ingredients or wish to use others, there’s also guidance on how to customize body butter recipes.
Use DIY Honey Body Butter All Over
The honey body butter that this recipe makes is firm yet creamy and melts on contact with your skin. Though I don’t recommend it for your face, it’s wonderful massaged elsewhere on your body from legs, arms, to knees. It spreads on like butter, and leaves your skin feeling soft and smooth. This is a luxurious homemade body butter for keeping your body’s skin conditioned and supple and is especially great for dry skin. It also adds a radiant glow, thanks to those wholesome butters and oil.
The honey in the recipe is a full teaspoon and on your body, it feels great. Honey is a natural humectant, meaning it draws moisture from the air to itself. In that way, it helps to moisturize your skin, but on the palms of your hands, it may feel slightly tacky. If you’d like to make conditioning oil-based skincare for hands, you could use my Herbal Healing Salve recipe.
Honey Body Butter Ingredients
There aren’t many ingredients in this recipe but I want to go through the reasons that I chose them. Shea butter is a conditioning oil that closely emulates your skin’s own sebum. It is also great for skin that is prone to eczema and can help soothe and repair skin that has been damaged by burns, scars, and stretch marks.
Cocoa butter is used for many of the same reasons as shea butter but it also gives a delicious chocolatey scent. That aroma is one of the reasons that I use it in this lip balm recipe. Cocoa butter also contains Cocoa Mass Polyphenol (CMP) which studies have shown could help ease conditions related to overactive immune systems, such as Psoriasis.
Used on their own, these two butters would create a very hard skincare product. That’s why we mix a liquid oil into the recipe, to soften the consistency up. Sweet almond oil is my favorite carrier oil but you could use another if you wish. Although completely optional, you could even macerate skin-healing oils into your carrier oil. Calendula is a fabulous skin healing herb, as is chamomile, which is why chamomile essential oil is in this recipe. The sweet almond oil that I used is infused with comfrey leaves as per these instructions.
Benefits of Honey for Skin
As a beekeeper, I may be a bit biased on the benefits of honey. I extract it from the comb every year and I use it in everything from greek yogurt to handmade soap. The evidence for honey’s health and healing properties are vast, though. It’s used as an alternative treatment to heal wounds, in some cancer therapies, and is well-known as a gentle throat soother. Honey is an important ingredient in medicine, food, and beauty as these fifty different recipes show.
In skincare, honey is used because it can heal wounds and skin abrasions, such as those caused by eczema and acne breakouts. It’s also a substance that can attract moisture from the air to your skin. This makes honey useful in skincare recipes aiming to replenish moisture and suppleness to the skin from head to toe.
How to make Honey Body Butter
Though the instructions for making honey body butter are simple, I’d like to explain the process a little better. Overheating oils can oxidize them, speeding up rancidification, and it can also change their texture and flavor. If you overheat oils infused with delicate herbs, such as the comfrey-infused sweet almond oil that I’m using, then beneficial properties may be lost. To avoid overheating, we gently melt our ingredients together using a double-boiler, or bain-marie.
Both simply refer to a pan or bowl that’s set inside another dish of hot water. This method indirectly heats the ingredients, melting them at a lower and more even temperature. You don’t have to buy a special device to do this in your own kitchen — simply find two saucepans that fit one inside the other. The photos in the recipe below will show you my set-up.
The other thing to keep in mind is that essential oils, raw honey, and herbal oils should be added at as low a temperature as possible. Doing this preserves the scent and integrity of each.
Handmade Honey Body Butter Recipe
Equipment
- Two stainless steel pans, one being smaller than the other (or a double boiler)
- Whisk
- Clean, dry, and sterilized containers. Can be tins or glass jars
Ingredients
Herbal Hand Salve Recipe
- 50 g Shea butter 1.76 oz
- 25 g Cocoa butter 0.88 oz
- 35 g Sweet almond oil 1.23 oz
- 7 g Honey 1 tsp / 0.25 oz
- 10 drops Chamomile essential oil optional
Instructions
- Measure the shea butter and cocoa butter into a small saucepan. Float this saucepan in another pan filled with simmering water to melt.
- Once the oils have fully melted, place the pan on a potholder and pour in the sweet almond oil and honey. Gently whisk together. If you notice the oils solidifying, place the pan back in the pan of water until fully melted again.
- Next, wipe off any moisture from the pan of oils, then place it in the freezer for five minutes.
- After five minutes have passed, take the pan out of the freezer, add the essential oil, if you’re using it, and whisk together well. Place the pan back in the freezer for five more minutes.
- Ten minutes in the freezer should have cooled the mixture to a consistency where there’s a thin solid skin on the surface. Underneath this skin, it should still be a little liquidy. Whisk it all together a final time, and you’ll have a beautifully scented and creamy honey body butter that’s easy to scoop out into a container. Work quickly, though, because it will quickly set solid.
- Scoop the honey body butter out of the pan and into your desired container. It could be a recycled jam jar, a pretty vintage pot, or a cosmetics tin like I’m using. The important thing is that it’s clean, sterilized, and perfectly dry.
- The body butter’s final consistency is like dairy butter that you’ve taken out of the fridge and has softened a little. It’s firm but easily scooped up. This honey body butter has a shelf-life that’s determined by the shelf lives of any of the ingredients that you used. Check the back of all of the bottles and the closest date is your shelf life. However, once you begin using it and getting your fingers in it, make sure that you use it all up within six months.
Notes
Customize this Honey Body Butter Recipe
One of the easiest types of natural skincare that you can make is oil-based salves, body balms, and body butters. The basic instructions for making them are simply measuring and melting the ingredients together. When they cool, they solidify into varying consistencies, depending on the ratio of hard to liquid oils. Also, because they don’t contain water, you don’t need to use preservatives, and you can customize them to your heart’s desire.
I’ve already mentioned that this recipe could be a little sticky on your hands, but if you use a little less honey then it won’t be. Want the body butter a little thicker? Use more of the harder oils. Want it to be softer and more ointment-like? Use a higher percentage of liquid oil. Making body butter isn’t a complex chemical process like soapmaking, which means that you can have a little more creative license.
You can use another light liquid carrier oil in place of the sweet almond oil if you wish, including grapeseed, apricot kernel, olive, and sunflower oil. You could alternatively use mango butter, sustainable palm oil, tallow, or lard for the shea butter. The cocoa butter is a hard and brittle oil and gives this body butter its thickness. There’s no direct substitute in that exact amount if you want to maintain the final consistency. You could replace it with a much smaller amount of beeswax or soy wax.
Thanks for the tips.
I was trying to replicate Crabtree & Evelyn’s citron, honey and coliander cream, but it’s made in the UK, and many UK products aren’t exported to the US anymore. Can’t get it.
While my recipe is slightly different than your’s with the butter and carrier oil, the addition of arrowroot and a small amount of bees wax, I needed to know when the honey is added. That was the trick.
I added lemon and coriander essential oils after the mixture was cooled and then
whipped it.
My version of the Crabtree & Evelyn classic is actually more potent than C & E’s, yet not overwhelming. Not sticky at all. Not greasy at all. I’m a newby at this and am very pleased with the results. I am happy to share my recipe here:
1). 1/2 cup Shea Butter and 1 TBSP beeswax to double boiler. Melt.
2). Mix 1/4 cup Grapeseed oil with 1 tsp arrowroot until blended. Add 1 tsp honey and mix. Add to melted Shea Butter mixture. Mix well and refrigerate for 30 minutes, or in the freezer as Lovely Greens suggests.
3). Add equal amounts of lemon and coriander essential oils to the cooled butter mixture. I used 6 drops each.
4). Whip the mixture with a fork or hand mixer. Dispense into a glass container.
Thanks Again.
Please can i use Shea butter, coconut oil, honey and put some drop of turmeric oil on it? Will it be nice on light and sensitive skin
Coconut oil melts very quickly so it can be a troublesome ingredient for body balms and lip balms. Anything above 78F (25C) and mixtures containing coconut oil start melting. Turmeric can be skin staining as well.
Ya…so I just made this body butter, sure doesn’t look like your photo..
but anyway I ran into all kinds of problems & thus have questions…I bought a scale for this, which I had trouble figuring out how to measure(subtract the bowl weight? Use a paper towel to measure on?)
I’ve never done anything like this before…grams?ounces? How to get accurate measurement for the almond oil …the easiest part of the whole thing was the 10 drops of Chamomile oil..I made 3 batches trying to get it right plus I have 1lb of each Shea & cocoa butter,only way I could find it online…the cocoa butter smell I do not care for at all, thought maybe the chamomile would override it but it did not, in fact there is no chamomile scent to the mixture at all🙁The last batch I used less cocoa butter & increased the Shea butter to try to diffuse the cocoa smell…not much luck with that…So I’d like to know if I can keep the b.b.in the containers in the fridge to last longer? Also the left over blocks of the butters can I keep in the fridge until I want to attempt this project again? Thnx
Hi Vickie, as an absolute beginner, you might have some work to do in order to understand recipes, measuring, ingredients, etc. To use a kitchen scale, place your bowl on it and turn the scale on. You can also press tare (or another button) to bring the readout down to zero so that you can measure ingredients. Cocoa butter is one of the main ingredients of chocolate and smells that way too. Most people adore the scent but since you don’t, I’d recommend that you save it for soapmaking and use another hard oil instead. Full replacement with shea butter, for example. The chamomile essential oil will come through without the scent of cocoa butter distracting you. You may add a little more essential oil if you wish though. Ten to fifteen drops, though.
Hi,
Thanks a ton for the recipe. I have a few questions, please answer them whenever you have time.
1. Can I add any other essential oils along with camomile oil? If so, what are they?
2. I don’t want my body butter to be too hard and too watery. It should have that creamy consistency and should melt as soon as I apply. Will your recipe work? Should I tweak the ratios?
3. I’m actually looking for a body butter for my 2 year old, would you recommend this or do you have any other suggestions?
Hi Meheru, there is no water in this recipe, so there’s no chance of it being watery. It’s also a true body butter, so creamy (as I think you’re imagining it) isn’t the right way to describe it either. This is an oil-based body butter that is much more like a salve or body balm in consistency. Yes, perfectly fine for all skin-types and the essential oil question is complex because yes, you can add others, but each type has its own usage rate. Go beyond the usage rate and the body butter could be irritating to the skin. As a beginner, I recommend that you stick with the recipe :)
Hello, Do you know how much powdered honey would be needed to replace the amount of liquid honey?
You could either rehydrate it or add 3/4 of the amount listed for honey. I’ve not used honey powder in this recipe before though so I’m not sure what the outcome would be, though. It may add a slightly gritty texture?
Hi there. Could I substitute mango butter for cocoa butter, or is it too soft?
It’s too soft, as you thought :)
I used shea butter as a body cream, loved it but now I’m using coconut oil it smells divine and I also use it for my hair and cooking.
When your using coconut oil in your hair. Do use it straight out of container ? Or is it mixed with something ?
You can do either if you wish :)
What can you use for substance for the sweet almond oil
Any light-textured liquid oil — sunflower oil, apricot kernel oil, rice bran oil.
Hola!
Con que puedo sustituir el aceite de almendras dulces?
Gracias de antemano por tu respuesta.
Hi Virginia, I used google translate to try to understand your question: “Hello! What can I substitute for sweet almond oil? Thanks in advance for your reply.”
You can use any vegetable oil that is liquid at room temperature in place of the sweet almond oil. That includes grapeseed oil, sunflower oil, and olive oil. Choose one that you don’t mind the scent of, and in the case of sunflower oil, I’d recommend a cold-pressed version. Hope this helps :)
Muchas gracias!
When I have to add the honey?
In step 2
Could you tell me the reasoning behind putting it in the freezer (steps 3- 5) when it will all be whisked together/melted anyhow? Thank you.
It cools the body butter and allows you to whip a little air into it, changing the texture, and stops the honey from settling at the bottom. If you simply melted the ingredients and poured them into a container, you’d have a solid body balm on top and the honey would form a layer on the bottom.
I will be trying this recipe soon. Thank you! I’m also a beekeeper and love to use my honey in my soaps however, I thought once you mix it into something such as a salve or butter, you need a preservative to prevent bacteria growth. You said, six months once you use it but, if I sold it, what about shelf life?
Hi Bonnie, you’ll know as a beekeeper that honey in itself doesn’t really have a shelf-life. We have to put one on bottles we sell because of regulations, but in reality, honey can last years, even decades, or longer and does not get colonized by bacteria. The other ingredients in the recipe are oils which also don’t get colonized by bacteria. Bacteria need a wet environment to grow. Shelf-life is explained in step 7.
Can I mix Shea butter, palm kernel oil, honey and little wax for body butter? How does it look after whisk and place under sunlight? Thanks.
Hi Samson and yes you can. You’ll need to work with different ratios of ingredients to create the recipe that you like best though. Trial and error until you get the right consistency.
Mine didn’t turn out well. In the final whipping process (step 5), I wasn’t able to obtain “an opaque creamy white” and it didn’t completely harden in 24 hours. Should I melt all the ingredients and try whipping, again?
Hi Linda — I’d recommend that you remelt and then skip the whipping step. Just pour the contents into a container afterwards. It will firm up like a body balm and you can use it in the same way.
Hi Tanya, I tried making it. The consistency was really very smooth and soft while whipping. But after leaving overnight at room temperature it has hardened. Is it possible to make body butter with creamy and soft consistency that spreads easily?
Thank you
Yes, you can make honey body butter with more of a ratio of liquid oils to solid. In other words, use less cocoa butter and shea butter, and more sweet almond oil. Doing that will create a softer texture, all the way down to a liquidy ointment.
Hi Tanya, I am a vegan. Can you recommend any replacements for the honey? Or would the recipe be just fine if skip it? Thanks!
Just skip it :)
Maybe Agava nectar it’s a vegan substrate to honey and or maple syrup
please can I mix Shea butter , honey,coconut oil n lemon to get beautiful chocolate skin? please let me know if this remedy is good for chocolate skin.
Lemon juice has water in it so I’d not recommend it for a product that doesn’t have a preservative in it. As for shea, coconut, and honey — they’re great for all skin types.
Hello, I would like to ask how big is this batch? is it just a jar or more? Thanks!! I am thinking to try it later today
It makes a pot about the same size as a Body Shop Body Butter tub.
Yeah, I thought so. I will double the ingredients and will try today! Thank you!:)
Can coconut oil be used in this recipe?
Absolutely! Play with the quantities but it might work well to replace the Shea Butter with Coconut oil as far as firmness goes. But if you want to keep the Shea, work the coconut oil in by replacing some of the liquid oil and Cocoa Butter.
Where do you find all the stuff to make this? Love shea butter, it’s great for my face
Google soap making supplies or cosmetic ingredients and you'll find some companies online that retail all the ingredients.
Hello I try your body butter but I think I overloaded with honey and it is now sticky. Do you know any way to repair the damage please ?
How much honey did you use?
What is the shelf life of this butter at room temperature?
The shelf-life is dependent on the exact ingredients that you used. Look on the labels to see when their best-by dates are — the closest date is your body butter’s best-by date. Once you begin using it, it needs to be used within six months.
Can this be made without using the cocoa butter? Could you just use extra shea butter instead?
You can do :)
Will this butter last longer than 6 months if a clean spatula is used instead of fingers to remove from container each use? Also, can this be whipped to be fluffier?
Yes, definitely, on both counts :)
Can I add only honey with my shea butter?
You could try but I have a feeling that the resulting cream would still be too hard. Shea butter is one of the softer 'hard' oils but it still would be difficult to scoop out of a tub once it had hardened. If you don't have any of the fancier liquid oils at home then I'd suggest picking up an inexpensive bottle of grapeseed oil the next time you're grocery shopping and use a bit of that to the recipe.
do you store it at room temperature or in the fridge?
Room temperature
Thank you! I made some today and it came out great. I was looking for something without all the crazy chemicals- I especially don't want them to rub off me onto my new baby!
That's so good to hear :)
It's about the same consistency.
Is this the same consistency as the Body shop body butters or greasier?
Another reason to make body butter at home! Thanks for stopping by Posie :)
Oh wow, sounds much yummier!! Also, those Body Shop butters are really expensive, so this is fabulous all round, love Posie
Glad to help :) Let me know how you get on!
Brilliant – thanks so much for the recipe. Can't wait to make some.