Review (1/5): Buyer beware. SheaMoisture products, once high-quality, now made of cheaper, common ingredients.
In late 2016, SheaMoisture intentionally started changing up the formulas in all of its products … for the worse. For example, all the new soap bar formulas have palm oil as their primary ingredient, making them basically no different from most other bar soaps ... except the REALLY cheap bar soaps (like those on grocery store shelves) that use "tallowate" – animal fat – as the primary ingredient.
I uploaded a picture of the old ingredients (in their Coconut & Hibiscus bar soap). The primary ingredients: coconut oil, coconut milk, papaya, vanilla beans, shea butter, cocoa butter, mushroom extract, Vitamin E, hibiscus. Little wonder I once found this bar soap on a beauty magazine's list of five best bar soaps.
Here's WHY they did it. In late 2015, Bain Capital, a venture capital firm, invested in SheaMoisture. SheaMoisture, being a privately-held company, must have "invited in" Bain … almost certainly to help them find a buyer for the SheaMoisture company. Bain makes its money when the company is sold, getting back more (for the percentage of the SheaMoisture company they bought) than what they paid to get it in the first place. At that point, neither Bain nor SheaMoisture had any further interest in the long-term outcomes & condition of the SheaMoisture company, the quality of SheaMoisture products or the integrity of the SheaMoisture customer base. They were "in it to flip it."
They cheapened the product costs with lousy formulas in order to improve the financial statements that would make the SheaMoisture company more attractive to potential buyers. Ruining their products, losing the customer base they built over many years, entirely irrelevant. And that's exactly how it played out. In late 2017 SheaMoisture was bought up by Unilever, turning a tidy profit for Bain off its very short-term investment (less than two years) … and nicely cashing-out the original owners of SheaMoisture … so they can go live in Bali or Monaco or somewhere.
Unilever's interest is easy to guess. SheaMoisture was successfully breaking away from its roots as a ethnic product line and was becoming recognized as a higher quality product in the mainstream market. So the SheaMoisture brand image is valuable to a high-volume mass marketer like Unilever. This is the same kind of story as with Burt's Bees; most people still think BB is some kind of specialty craft/upscale product as it once was, not having the least idea that these days it is nothing more than a brand name owned by the Clorox corporation.
To be fair a lot of Unilever products are of somewhat better quality than the product against which they directly complete. Still, Unilever is high-volume, so they won't ever be able to return to the more expensive, much higher quality formulas that SheaMoisture once used.
As my stock of classic SheaMoisture bar soaps winds down, I am still searching for a high-quality replacement bar soap … that doesn't cost a small fortune. One of the better choices at this point seems to be the "Out of Africa" bar soaps; they are one of the few bar soaps left that do not contain palm oil as the primary ingredient, instead they contain about 20% shea butter.