Experimenting With Clarified Butter for My Eczema

I am a big fan of trying DIY skincare. So, you can only imagine the intrigue stirred in me the other morning when I came across an article while scrolling through Reddit about using “a hundred-times-washed clarified butter as a moisturizer"!¹

I just knew I had to try it!

What is clarified butter, or ghee?

For those of you who may not be familiar with clarified butter, it is the result of removing all of the milk solids and water – leaving only butterfat. I’m personally more familiar with its other name, which is "ghee."²

Ghee is a type of clarified butter that originated from India and has uses in Ayurvedic traditional medicine and skincare, as well as historical and current Indian culinary practices.²

How do you make a clarified butter moisturizer?

Now, it’s not as simple as slappin’ some ghee on your face and calling it a day. They don’t call it "hundred-times-washed" for nothing.

Making this moisturizer involves mixing a cup of ghee with 1 to 2 cups of distilled water for 5 minutes, straining it, replacing the water, and repeating the process until you have done this 100 times. Luckily, the original instructions by Beets and Bones simplified the process down to 25 washes. In the historical Ayurvedic practice, chanting may have been involved. I, like the writer of the Beets and Bones article, chose to omit the chanting.

So why wash the butter? The clarified butter, through this process, turns from a pungent, yellow liquid to an odorless, off-white, fluffy body butter-esque moisturizer that is shelf-stable.

How did I plan to tackle this experiment?

Naturally, I was skeptical that it would work, but I decided to go into the experiment with an open mind. I gathered my ingredients and tools: a 1-gallon jug of distilled water, a cup of ghee, a mixer, and a fine mesh sieve and got to work. My mother generously offered the use of her kitchen and stand mixer for my experiment, as I only have a hand mixer at home. The hand mixer seemed both inappropriate and painful for this experiment.

Would repeating washing actually work?

Before this experiment, I had limited contact with ghee. I opened the container, removed the foil-protective packaging, and noticed the strong smell. I was even more uncertain than when I started that repeated water washing alone could remove the strong scent from the clarified butter. Regardless, I soldiered on. I ran the first cups of water through the mixer with the ghee, strained the water out in the sieve, and repeated the process with fresh water from the jug.

When did I notice a change?

It was around the third wash that the texture and color of the ghee began to change quite noticeably. The smell was still quite pungent, though. It was around the 11th or 12th wash, after I had been standing at the counter mixing and straining for an hour, that I began wondering why the hell I wanted to do this in the first place.

When did I stop washing the ghee?

Some quick mental math told me I still had about an hour to go. I groaned and kept on washing and straining. It was at wash number 20 that my jug ran out of water, and my experiment concluded. My neck and back were grateful it was over. My poor mum's kitchen was a greasy mess. After a final strain through the sieve, I packaged my concoction in a glass jar and put it in the fridge while I cleaned the kitchen.

Did it look and feel as it should?

Later that evening, once at home and with a freshly cleaned face, I decided to test the whipped butter concoction. The experiment was certainly successful in terms of the texture and consistency of the clarified butter changing. However, the strong scent of the butter still lingered slightly. Maybe 20 washes were insufficient to get rid of the scent, or maybe it’s just my sensitive nose.

Regardless, the scent ended up being irrelevant because I just didn’t end up liking the feeling of the moisturizer on my skin. I gave it a solid 3 days of trial before I gladly ditched it in the garbage.

Did I like how it felt on my skin?

Unfortunately, I didn’t have any present eczema flares to test it out on during the course of the experiment.

However, I must state that although I didn’t personally like the feeling and scent of the moisturizer, it didn’t cause any reactions or flares. The highly unpleasant sensory experience of the ghee moisturizer was the straw that broke the camel's back in this case.

Overall, it was a good reminder that not all experiments are successful in the end and that going into these kinds of experiments requires acceptance of that. It would have been great if it had ended up being the moisturizer secret of the century for atopic dermatitis sufferers, but that unfortunately wasn’t the result. I enjoyed the process nonetheless, and while I didn’t leave with a new skincare tool, I did learn a bunch of stuff and had a bit of fun doing it!