Body scrubs are a really great start to your morning routine, and can be the difference between a simple shower and a luxurious pampering. Body scrubs are simple beauty treatments, just designed to exfoliate and thoroughly cleanse your skin, leaving it smooth and glowing, often with a tingle, and usually also designed to leave you smelling divine.
What Goes Into a Body Scrub?
Most body scrubs are based around a simple idea – beauty treatments involving a body scrub usually comprise some kind of small, abrasive grains mixed with moisturising, aromatic ingredients in a gentle base. The grains are usually coarse salt or sugar but can also be apricot kernel, walnut and other gritty body scrub ingredients. The coarse ingredient does the exfoliating by loosening the dead skin cells that make skin look dull, while the base moisturises. Other ingredients add moisture, and have other therapeutic effects – or just smell good!
Making Your Own Moisturising Body Scrub from Natural Ingredients
For a pampering and soothing beauty treatment you can concoct a beauty boosting body scrub of your own for a fraction of the cost of a shop bought product. Another bonus is that yours will be made from natural ingredients so you don’t need to worry about the chemicals that might be in a commercial beauty product.
To start with, when you make a scrub, just choose a naturally abrasive ingredient with a hydrating base. The favourite natural ingredient for a homemade body scrub is probably sugar, because it’s less harsh than salt and easily available. Both work well though.
For a fruity homemade sugar scrub that’s packed with natural ingredients to nourish your skin, add some mashed banana, strawberry or mango to a sugar base and mix it until it forms a coarse paste. This delicious scrub will leave you feeling fruity all day! You could also add some honey for extra moisturising. Apply the homemade body scrub in the shower using a circular motion, paying extra attention to any rough areas like elbows or your knees.
Leave the scrub to soak into your skin for a few minutes so that your skin can absorb the nutrients and then rinse it off under the shower with lukewarm water. Pat your skin dry gently.
A Homemade Wake Up Scrub For The Shower
Although salt is a little coarser than sugar, it works really well in a body scrub, especially if you’re looking for something that will wake you up and get you revitalised in the morning. Add equal amounts of sea salt and a carrier oil (you could try sweet almond carrier oil, or even try making the scrub with olive oil although this has a fragrance of its own) and mix well, then add fragrance – depending on your taste you could wake up with a zing by adding a few drops of a citrus essential oil like lemon or lime to the mixture – or perhaps clear your head with some eucalyptus or peppermint oil.
The beauty of this body scrub is that you can tailor the mixture to suit your mood; in fact you could add lavender, rose or chamomile and have a relaxing end of the day beauty treat instead.
Again, massage the mixture onto your body, being gentle as sea salt can be a little scratchy. Leave it to soak into your skin, and long enough for the fragrance to really take hold, then rinse off with lukewarm water.
Be careful when using this mixture in a bath, as the oils can make the bath a little slippery!