Scrubs - Mocha Spice Sugar Scrub

This recipe sounds and smells utterly delicious and divine. 

Recipe:

• 1 cup light brown baking sugar
• 1 tablespoon ground coffee
• 1 tablespoon cocoa powder
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• Generous pinch nutmeg
• Generous pinch ginger
• 1/4 to 1/2 cup Mineral Oil 

Mix it all up and go! Instead of mineral oil you can use almond oil, light sesame oil, or jojoba.

This smelled wonderful even if it looked a little.. brown. And it did a great job as a scrub. My skin felt smooth as silk but it was still a little too harsh for my very sensitive skin. Basically, as far as scrubs go, I believe I can only use oatmeal.. so if you have sensitive skin like I do use this lightly.

The only thing I did NOT like about this (and the main reason why I won't be making it again) is that the coffee ended up turning my skin brown. Coffee stains.. and it left brown streaks all over the bathtub. I'm not particularly squeamish about that sort of thing, but it actually required more cleanup than I want to deal with. It's a great recipe and smells and feels wonderful.. but having to scrub brown stains out of the shower curtain from it didn't really make me fall in love with it.

Still.. worth a try at least once!  

[Original recipe can be found here]

Scrubs - The Stupid Easy Salt Scrub

You can end up spending a ton of money buying scrubs at the store. The top selling body scrub at Sephora is about $40 and the cheap kinds use all sorts of unnatural ingredients.

Turns out that making a Salt Scrub is so easy.. it's stupid.


Salt Scrub Recipe:

• 1 cup Epsom or Sea Salt
• 1 cup of baby oil

The 1 cup of baby oil is subjective. All depends on how runny/coarse you want the scrub to be. Just start mixing in baby oil into the salt until you get the texture you want. Generally, it's one-to-one.

Personally, I hate the smell of baby oil. So I found out that Target sells pure Mineral Oil for about $2 in my area.  Baby oil is just a bit lighter mineral oil and fragrance, so you can just use pure mineral oil and add some essential oil for fragrance. All depends on what is more readily available to you.

This is a really easy salt scrub to make and my fiancée absolutely loved it. It takes about 5 minutes to make and lasts a while. You can put it in a decorative jar (I'm keeping ours in canning jars sold at Walmart) and it looks pretty as hell. 

The best way to use a scrub is to play music in the bathroom or leave the door open so music comes in from the outside. Sit on the edge of the tub and start at your poor abused feet and rub it in in slow massaging circles and work your way up. Play close attention to your feet, knees, and elbows. Relax and close your eyes and enjoy the sensations of the massaging rub in your body.

Unfortunately, I couldn't use this recipe on myself though. I tried and by the time I worked my way up to my knees, my poor sensitive skin was on FIRE! The salt was just WAAAAY too harsh for my poor skin. So be careful. If you have sensitive skin this might be too harsh for you. Despite the pain.... my skin felt oh so very soft after this. So I found sugar and oatmeal scrub recipes that I'll be posting about later for those with more sensitive skin types.