Butters compared: shea, cocoa, mango, kokum and seven more

Shea, cocoa, mango, kokum, illipe, murumuru, cupuacu, tucuma, sal and avocado butter compared on melt point, fatty acids, hardness, grain and feel.

A butter is a fat that happens to be solid at room temperature and liquid at skin temperature. That narrow window is the whole point of using one. It is also why butters cannot be swapped freely: two butters with the same label word behave very differently once you know their fatty acid profile and how they crystallise.

The master comparison table

Melt ranges and fatty acid figures below are typical ranges for commercial cosmetic grades. Real material varies with origin, harvest year and refining, so treat any single number as the middle of a spread rather than a specification. The hardness column is an ordinal workshop ranking assigned by the Trebalm editorial desk on a 1 to 10 scale, judged by how a chilled 100% block resists a thumbnail at 20 C. It is not a measured penetration value.

How to choose a butter by what you want it to do

Start from the property you actually need, not from the plant name.

• Hardness. Rank by stearic acid content, because stearic triglycerides set firm. Kokum first, then illipe and sal, then cocoa, then mango, then shea. If a stick is collapsing in summer, adding 5% kokum does more than adding 5% shea.
• Cushion. The soft, padded feel comes from a butter that is only partly crystalline at skin temperature. Shea leads here, cupuacu is close behind. This is the quality people mean when they say a balm feels rich rather than waxy.
• Gloss. Lauric butters (murumuru, tucuma) and cocoa butter give the shiniest melt-down because they crystallise into fine, light-scattering plates and then collapse quickly. For lip gloss you would still reach for castor oil first.
• Low odour. Kokum, mango, refined shea, deodorised cocoa. Unrefined shea and natural cocoa butter both carry scent that will fight your fragrance.
• Low grain. Kokum, illipe, murumuru, tucuma. These have the most uniform triglyceride mixtures, so there is no minority fraction sitting around waiting to recrystallise separately.

A useful shortcut: high oleic butters feel soft and greasy, high stearic butters feel hard and dry, high lauric butters feel light and disappear fast. Almost everything else follows from that. If you want to see how these sit against the liquid phase of a formula, the carrier oils comparison covers the other side of the same trade-off.

Why butters and waxes are not the same tool

This is the single most useful structural fact in balm making, and it is usually skipped.

A butter is a triglyceride: three fatty acids on a glycerol backbone. Triglycerides pack into layered crystals whose melting point depends on chain length and saturation, and because any real butter is a mixture of many different triglycerides, it melts over a range rather than at a point. Those ranges sit at roughly 30-42 C, which straddles skin temperature. That is why a butter softens the moment it touches you.

A wax is not a triglyceride. Beeswax is mostly long-chain esters of fatty acids and fatty alcohols plus hydrocarbons, and candelilla and carnauba are similar in principle. Those molecules are longer, straighter and far more uniform, so they crystallise into a fine three-dimensional network at much higher temperatures: 62-64 C for beeswax, 82-86 C for carnauba. At 34 C that network is nowhere near melting. It behaves as a solid scaffold with liquid oil trapped in its interstices.

The practical consequence is that waxes set structure and butters set feel. Two grams of beeswax will hold a balm together in a way that ten grams of shea cannot, and ten grams of shea will give a cushion that no amount of beeswax will ever produce. The full comparison of the structurant side lives in the waxes compared guide, and the mechanics of how the two phases interact are covered in balm texture science.

Refined against unrefined, honestly

Unrefined butter is pressed or expelled and filtered, keeping colour, scent and the full unsaponifiable fraction. Refined butter has been through some combination of neutralising, bleaching (usually with clay, not chlorine) and deodorising by steam stripping under vacuum.

The myth worth retiring is that unrefined is always better. It is better if the unsaponifiable fraction is what you are buying the butter for, which is a real argument for shea and a much weaker one for mango or kokum, whose unsaponifiables are around 1-2%. It is worse if you are making a lip balm that must taste of nothing, a scented product, or a batch that has to look identical to the last one. Refining does not damage the fat that does most of the work, because that fat is triglyceride and triglyceride is what survives refining intact.

Substituting one butter for another

Swap on hardness, not on weight. The table below gives the approximate quantity of each butter that delivers the firmness of 10 parts of shea in the same base, derived from the hardness ranking above. Treat it as a starting point for a test batch, never as a final formula.

A worked swap in grams

Take a straightforward body balm. All percentages are weight percent of the total and add to 100.

• Beeswax 8%
• Shea butter 30%
• Sweet almond oil 61.5%
• Tocopherol 0.5%

At a 200 g batch that is 16 g beeswax, 60 g shea, 123 g almond oil and 1 g tocopherol. To replace the shea with kokum, take 30 parts shea to 19.5 parts kokum (30 divided by 10, times 6.5), round to 20%, and put the released 10% into the liquid oil. Because kokum is also stiffer per gram than the shea it replaces, drop the beeswax by one point:

• Beeswax 7%
• Kokum butter 20%
• Sweet almond oil 72.5%
• Tocopherol 0.5%

At 200 g: 14 g beeswax, 40 g kokum, 145 g almond oil, 1 g tocopherol. The result should feel close in firmness, drier on application and completely neutral in smell. If it sets too hard, take another point off the wax before you touch the butter. The same reasoning in the other direction is the usual fix in balm too hard or too soft, and the ratio windows behind it are set out in lip balm ratios.

Graininess: which butters do it and why

Grain is not spoilage and it is not water. It is a recrystallisation problem. A butter that contains a wide spread of triglycerides can, on slow cooling, let its highest-melting stearin-rich fraction crystallise on its own into large crystals, which the tongue and fingertip read as sand. Shea has the widest spread of the common butters and the worst reputation to match. Mango and cupuacu are middling. Kokum is nearly immune because roughly three quarters of its triglycerides share one arrangement, so there is no distinct high-melting minority to separate out.

Cocoa butter has a different version of the same physics. It is polymorphic, meaning the same triglycerides can pack in six different ways, and slow cooling or a partial melt lets it drift towards the coarse, stable form that shows as pale streaks called bloom.

Which butters to actually stock

Three cover almost everything. Refined shea butter for cushion and body, cocoa butter for hardness and snap, and one neutral hard butter from the mango and kokum pair for the products that must not smell of anything. Add coconut oil only if you want its fast, light melt-down, and treat it as a liquid oil that happens to be solid in the jar rather than as a structurant.

The exotic butters are worth buying when you have a specific reason: illipe or sal when you want cocoa butter hardness without chocolate scent, murumuru or tucuma when you want a glossy fast melt, cupuacu when you want unusual cling on a body product. Buying all ten at once mostly teaches you how quickly unrefined fats go off. Buy two, learn what they do at 10%, 20% and 30% of the same base, and the rest of the table stops being a list and starts being a set of dials.

Reviewed and updated 6 September 2026. Spotted an error? Tell us and we will fix and log it.