Stretch Marks - What to Do

Preventing Stretch Marks

It's easier to prevent stretch marks than to get rid of them. By using shea butter to make the skin on your stomach and breasts highly elastic before your skin begins to stretch, it is possible to avoid stretch marks altogether.

Getting Rid of Stretch Marks

To get rid of stretch marks, you need to enhance your skin's elasticity and provide it with a restorative to repair damage already done. Stretch marks appear when your skin is stretched beyond its capacity. As your pregnancy progresses, the skin on your stomach and breasts is stretched. If the stretching happens rapidly and your skin isn't sufficiently elastic, purplish-red lines - stretch marks - will appear.

At this point, you need to do two things:

• Prevent the stretch marks from growing by making the skin around the stretch marks more elastic,
• Make the stretch marks fade and soften by restoring the damaged cells to a healthy state.

For centuries, women of Africa have been using unrefined shea butter to remedy all sorts of skin problems - including stretch marks. Shea butter is a wonderful healing agent for stretch marks. Unrefined shea butter not only contains a high moisturizing fraction, but also contains an extraordinarily high healing fraction. The essential oils that can work with shea butter to restore the cells damaged by the natural skin expansion of pregnancy include Lavender, Patchouli, Sandalwood.

The following Karite Gold products each contain Shea Butter and one or more of the essential oils that are most efficacious for stretch marks, and they are all about equally effective. Click on any of these products to find out more about them.

• Shea Butter with Lavender and Myrrh   (fragrance: light and soothing)
• Shea Butter with Lavender, Grapefruit and Vanilla   (fragrance: fresh and invigorating)
• Shea Butter with Sandalwood and Lavender   (fragrance: soft and alluring)
• Shea Butter with Bergamot and Patchouli   (fragrance: subtley spicey with a hint of the outdoors)
• Shea Butter with Sandalwood and Patchouli   (fragrance: earthy and unpretentious)
• Shea Butter with Ylang-Ylang, Vanilla and Patchouli   (fragrance: fragile yet harmonious)

To prevent or fade stretch marks, apply a moderate amount of Karite Gold three times a day. After you have coated an area of your skin with shea butter, spend some time making sure that the shea butter works its way down under the surface of your skin. Move your fingers in a circular motion as you apply the shea butter.

To learn more about Shea Butter and the essential oils that are used for stretch marks, click on the links below:

• Shea Butter
• Lavender
• Patchouli
• Sandalwood

Alternative Medicine

For an explanation of why this treatment works, we recommend the book Medical Aromatherapy: Healing with Essential Oils by Kurt Schnaubelt. If your skin problem persists, we strongly recommend that you see a medical professional - either a dermatologist or a practioner of wholistic medicine who specializes in skin problems.

Click here to learn about other skin problems, besides stretch marks, that shea butter has been known to help. Click here to go back to the top of this Stretch Marks - What to Do page.