How To Fix Your Gritty Beard Butter

One of the benefits of a great beard butter like the beard butter from Luxurious Bastard is that it melts down in your hand quickly and that makes for easy application to your beard. Unfortunately, that same great property also makes it inevitable that there will be melting during shipping transit with warm temperatures and likely some grit will form in that butter. The grit does not harm or change the product at all, but we understand it can be an inconvenience. In this blog we will go over the causes and solutions for gritty beard butter.

Causes - If there is a roughness or grittiness to your beard butter, the good news is the company is using a natural butter and most likely a shea butter. Here at Luxurious Bastard, we are proud to use the highest quality shea butter available, and that is going to give your beard the best nourishment possible. The grit does not change the effectiveness of the product at all. However, we want you to have the smoothest consistency just like when it left our lab to ship to you.

The grit is caused by the shea butter melting, and slowly cooling to resolidify again. Shea butter has a relatively low melting point, and it can melt easily in hot shipping vehicles. The grit is formed when the different parts of shea butter solidify at different temperatures. There are things called fatty acids in butters, and they are great for our beards. Shea butter has several different fatty acids and they all become solid at slightly different cooling points. Some of those fatty acids include linoleic acid, lauric acid, linolenic acid, oleic acid, arachidic acid, stearic acid, and palmitic acid. 

Solutions - Luckily it is very simple to get your beard butter back to its original smooth consistency. To summarize you will want to melt the beard butter down to a liquid like state, and then rapidly cool the beard butter. This will get rid of all of your grit, and it will remain that way unless it melts and slowly cools again.

Here are some of the steps you can take to achieve this. There are several ways to melt your beard butter down, but some methods will come down to the type of container it comes in.  If you have a metal container or a label that has any metallic foil on it… do not put it in the microwave! If it is in a plastic container, you can use the microwave, but be very careful and watch it very closely. If you go for too long or get it too hot, you will melt the plastic container. You want to go for short increments of 10-15 seconds, stir, and repeat until it is liquid. We do not actually recommend the microwave method though.

Another common method is using a double boil. This method is much gentler on the butter and allows for it to be more consistent. The easiest way is to likely remove the beard butter from the original container. Place it in a pot that can fit over your bottom boiler pot. The bottom pot should have an inch or two of water, and then your burner should be placed on a simmer. The pot with the butter goes on top, and you will gently stir as it melts.

Once the beard butter is melted you will want to get it back in the original container, and then place that container in your refrigerator or freezer with the lid off. Once the beard butter is solid in an hour or two, you can remove it and store it. 

An added bonus is your home will now smell fantastic with the fragrance of your Luxurious Bastard beard butter scent!