Unrefined Kpangnan Butter | Traditional West African Butter
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Rich, velvety and lesser-known outside West Africa, unrefined kpangnan butter is a traditional botanical butter with a golden tone. Often used in skincare, this butter melts easily into the skin and is ideal for creating body butters, massage blends or everyday moisturisers.
Kpangnan is less greasy, making it a popular choice when you want a fast-absorbing finish without compromising on richness. It has a slightly earthy or smokey scent and a subtle yellow colour but not as bright as yellow shea, which is typically coloured with the borututu plant.
Highlights:
- Easily absorbed with no oily residue
- A great base for balms, lotions and massage oils
- Traditionally valued in West African body care
This butter is offered in its pure, unrefined form - free from additives, fillers, or processing.
Growing in the rainforest belt of West Africa, including Ghana, the kpangnan tree can reach a height of nearly 20 metres. Kpangnan butter is a firm, edible vegetable fat traditionally extracted from its seeds. In Ghana, it’s sometimes used as a cooking ingredient, occasionally replacing red palm oil in local dishes.
This versatile butter can also be incorporated into natural skin and hair care formulations, or used as a nourishing base in massage body bars.
Texture: Firm plant butter
Scent: Natural, earthy aroma
How to Use:
Warm a small amount between your palms and apply to clean skin, or blend into your favourite DIY skincare recipes.
SAP Values:
NaOH: 0.136 | KOH: 0.191
INCI: Pentadesma butyracea
Country of Origin: Ghana
Unless otherwise stated, our exotic butters are natural and unrefined.
NATURAL + UNREFINED: We work directly with cooperatives and artisanal producers who process our range of pure natural raw butters without the use of chemicals. Some of these are organic in nature and filtered for use retaining the natural characteristic scent and quality.
We sell our range of exotic butters by weight. Since most of these butters are not re-melted for sale, we use slightly bigger jars.
UNDERSTANDING BUTTERS: Most butters and oils are made up of two components - olein (liquid) and stearin (stearic). This is why some butters easily melt depending on the amount of olein and some solidify under colder temperatures depending on the amount of stearin. This does not affect the product in anyway.
Butters are mainly naturally occurring. However, there are new butters emerging within the cosmetic industry due to market trends. These butters are vegetable oils which are hydrogenated. Hydrogenation yields a saturated butter and these include but not limited to Almond butter, Avocado butter, Coffee butter, Hemp butter, Macadamia butter, Olive butter, Ricebran butter, ..... the list goes on
Naturally occurring butter on the other hand are normally pressed from seeds and do not go through any hydrogenation:
Cocoa, Cupuaçu, Kombo, Mango, Murumuru, Shea, etc.
These are all solid at room temperature depending on both the palmitic and stearic acid content and need heat to melt.
Cocoa butter has 33% stearic and 25% palmitic acid compared to shea butter with 40% stearic and 4% palmitic acid. Looking at these two profiles, cocoa butter is more of a solid butter than shea which makes the latter more easy to apply. However, due to the high stearic content of shea, the butter becomes quite solid in very cold temperatures.
Unlike most butters, the texture of shea changes during the year. Much softer in summer and much harder in winter. This does not affect the natural properties of the butter.