Cocoa butter outside chocolate

Cocoa butter is pressed from cocoa mass, and what happens next determines what it is sold as.

Natural cocoa butter retains the aroma of the beans it came from, which is desirable in chocolate and undesirable in a cream that is meant to smell of something else. Deodorised cocoa butter has been steam-treated to remove that aroma, and it is the grade used in cosmetics and in most pharmaceutical applications.

Chocolate makers use both. Deodorised butter is used where added butter should not bring its own flavour — in white chocolate, and in adjusting the flow of a bar whose flavour is already decided.

The same property that makes it useful in chocolate: it is solid at room temperature and melts just below body temperature. That is exactly what a suppository base needs, and it is why cocoa butter has a long pharmaceutical history. It is also what makes it feel the way it does applied to skin — solid in the tin, liquid on contact.

It is also stable against oxidation compared with many plant fats, which matters for shelf life in any application.

Whether cocoa butter does anything for a skin condition. That is a clinical question, the consumer literature on it is largely promotional, and ChocolateHQ's evidence rules do not permit an efficacy claim without sources this catalogue does not hold.

What can be said is the physical part: it is an occlusive fat that melts at body temperature, and that is a description of behaviour rather than of benefit.