Cocoa Butter Softness for Your Skin

While we most commonly look at food or drink products here on The Chocolate Cult we will examine anything related to chocolate especially if we are sent the product to test out.  Last year I joined a program called PinchMe and every now and again I've gotten a chocolate related product.  Today I want to look at a lotion made with cocoa butter and compare it to another lotion by the same company not made with cocoa butter to see if there is a difference. Personally I'd prefer that the cocoa butter stay in chocolate but cosmetics manufacturers are big buyers of cocoa butter and there may be reasons for that. Both of these Suave lotions came in the same size bottles through PinchMe so let's take a look at them.

Suave Smoothing with cocoa butter and shea claims it "softens rough, dry skin" for 24 hours. I find this very difficult to test because throughout the day I have to wash my hands repeatedly. Cocoa seed butter is the 17th ingredient on the list with six ingredients later being shea butter. The only oils in the Advanced Therapy bottle is from sunflower seeds and its bottle claims that it "relieves severely dry skin" which I have at this point in the year.  Let's look at a small amount of each side by side on the back of one of my hands in the photo to the left of this paragraph -- same layout as the photo above -- Smoothing on the left, Advanced Therapy on the right. As you can see the one with cocoa seed butter is yellow while the other lotion is bright white making it easy to tell them apart. By the way, neither changes the color of your skin after you apply it.

How did they feel on my skin? First off, I have very sensitive skin because I have a lot of allergies especially when it comes to "natural" ingredients found in a lot of body care products these days.  Neither of these made my skin react in a negative way. The Smoothing lotion with the cocoa seed butter was absorbed quicker and had no slick, slippery, or sticky affect on my skin, but it did leave a slightly cocoa butter scent. The Advance Therapy was a touch sticky while it was absorbed but that ended within ten minutes; its scent was more generic lotion.  With 2 oz of each to try I was able to apply this to my hands, my face, and my arms over the course of a couple of weeks. Sometimes I applied one to one side of my body and the other to the other side to gauge any difference. Frankly once both were absorbed by my skin, the only difference was the slight fragrance and my partners didn't even notice that.

At the end this is a challenging review for me because as a chocolate lovers who wants to promote the best for us all, I really dislike the idea of cocoa butter being used for cosmetics instead of food and drinks if it will be replaced by added oils and fats, often from plants we really need to be taking better care of such as palms. On the other hand between the two, the Smoothing lotion made with cocoa seed butter performed slightly better. So you tell me, Sisters and Brothers, have you tried either of these lotions? If so, what do you think about them and the issue of cocoa butter in cosmetics?