The body-sized, plant-only version of the most famous product Weleda makes. 150 ml of very rich butter for skin that is properly dry — elbows, knees, shins, heels, hands after a winter.
Skin Food is nearly a century old. Weleda launched it in 1926, and it has been in continuous production since, largely unchanged — a thick green salve that developed a following among people who had never bought a natural cosmetic in their lives, because it worked on cracked hands when nothing else did. Very few products survive a hundred years on word of mouth.
The important difference: this one is vegan. The original Skin Food gets much of its occlusive power from lanolin and beeswax, both animal-derived. This Body Butter replaces them with shea butter and cocoa butter. That matters twice over: once for anyone avoiding animal ingredients, and once for anyone with a lanolin allergy, which is not rare. If you have reacted to the classic Skin Food in the past, this is worth trying — lanolin may well have been the reason.
What makes it work. Cocoa butter and shea butter are solid at room temperature and melt at body heat, so they spread on contact and then set into a film that slows water loss from the skin. Sunflower oil supplies lighter emollience, and glycerine draws water into the outer layer. Alongside them are the plant extracts that have always defined Skin Food — calendula, chamomile, pansy and rosemary. It is a straightforward, unfashionable, effective formula: nothing in it is novel, and it does not need to be.
Use it correctly and it is twice as good. Apply within three minutes of getting out of the shower, on skin that is still damp. An occlusive butter works by trapping water — so if you apply it to bone-dry skin, there is very little water there to trap. This single habit does more for dry skin than switching between products ever will.
It is thick. That is the point, and it is also the caveat: warm a little between your palms first, and expect to wait a few minutes before dressing.
Available at Só Verde, an organic concept store in Foz, Porto.