HOW TO: Make your own Body Scrub at home
Have you ever heard that our skin is our biggest organ? Like every other thing in our body it needs to be taken care of!
One of the best things you can do for your skin is to regularly use body scrubs when showering! This cleans your skin of dead epidermic cells and promotes blood flow to the surface of your body. The latter is very important since it also boosts your lymphatic system and flushes all the waste products out of your body!
So can we and HOW TO make our own body scrub?
It is actually very easy, requires just some basic ingredients and is super good for you. It's in fact much better than all those store bought peelings and scrubs we all buy on regular basis.
Before we start with the recipes themselves, it's good to explain a little about the method of making a body scrub.
In each type of homemade body peeling there are few basic components - the dry ingredient, which can vary in structure (more/less grainy, fine/roughly ground), the carrier oil, which is the main substance that holds the scrub together and last but not least the essential oil, which brings some special qualities and aromas to the mixture, that deeply penetrate and nourish our skin.
SUGARY-SALTY Body Scrub with Ylang-ylang
Ingredients:
1/2 cup finely ground Himalayan Salt
1/2 cup organic Brown Sugar
1/2 cup Grape Seed Oil
10-15 drops of Ylang-Ylang essential Oil
Preparation:
1. Mix the dry ingredients.
2. Slowly add the carrier oil until you reach the desired consistency.
3. Finally stir in the essential oil, mixing well.
Sugar has several benefits for your skin. While it exfoliates, it's also known as a powerful humectant - a substance that draws the moisture from the environment into the skin, keeping it hydrated. Sugar is also a natural source of AHA - alpha hydroxy acid. AHA is known for braking down the "glue" that bonds skin cells, encouraging cell turnover and generating fresher, younger-looking skin.
Salt also helps retain moisture in the skin but mean while it also helps reduce water retention (bloating) because of the Magnesium it contains.
Grape Seed oil has plenty of uses and benefits! Tightening skin, moisturizing, preventing aging are just some of them.
Ylang-Ylang essential oil has an incredible scent and if that's not enough to convince you to put a few drops in your homemade scrub, then let me tell you it's also antidepressant, antiseborrheic, aphrodisiac, hypotensive and sedative functions.
SWEET COFFEE-NUT Body Scrub
Ingredients:
1/2 cup ground Coffee
1/2 cup organic Muscovado Sugar
1/2 cup Grape Seed Oil
10 drops of Cacao essential Oil
10 drops of Walnut essential Oil
Preparation:
1. Mix the dry ingredients.
2. Slowly add the carrier oil until you reach the desired consistency.
3. Finally stir in the essential oil, mixing well.
Coffee is rich in antioxidants and it will leave your skin smooth and glowing. At the same time it protects you from the harsh UVB sun rays and also enhances blood circulation.
Cacao essential Oil is also widely known for its high concentration of antioxidants, which work to keep body cells, collagen and elastin from damage, by free radicals. It is also known to contain aphrodisiac Tramadol qualities resulting from the presence of flavonols, which is an active constituent in cacao.
Walnut essential Oil is a skin regenerative and skin toning, as well as anti-aging and emollient (moisturizing) effect.
If you wonder why in one of the recipes I used brown sugar and in the other Muscovado sugar, here's the explanation - my coffee was fairly rough ground so I needed finer sugar to obtain the consistency I wanted. While with the SUGARY-SALTY scrub the salt was really finely ground and adding the not so fine regular brown sugar was a better choice.
I personally used wooden sticks for mixing the scrub. It just seemed right to mix all the natural ingredients with a natural material instead of using a plastic or metal spoon. But that part is up to you!
I hope you enjoyed reading! If you did - please subscribe to stay informed about new posts on my blog!
XOXO,
Gabi K.