Green Your Life: Homemade Body Scrub Recipes

Reader Contribution by Dani Hurst
Published on November 22, 2010
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As cold weather sets in, the dry air can make your skin feel dull and flaky. You can slather on gobs of store-bought lotions and creams, but those can start to cake on your skin if you aren’t careful. Skin scrubs are a great way to exfoliate dead skin cells and impurities off skin, but they can be expensive and, if bought at the store, aren’t a very sustainable option. You can make many scrubs at home from ingredients already in your pantry, and you can customize them to fit your skin’s needs. Try some of these natural and simple scrub recipes on your winter skin today.

Combining simple ingredients such as a grapefruit, sugar and olive oil will yield a soothing skin scrub. Use one half of the grapefruit for the scrub and rub the other half on rough spots before scrubbing. Photo By Dani Hurst.

Citrus and Sugar Scrub

The fruit acid in this sugar scrub recipe from Whole Living loosens dead skin cells. I used a grapefruit instead of an orange, and I liked the tangy smell of this scrub, but the mixture was too runny. It left my skin with an oily residue and lacked the satisfying exfoliation of a grainier scrub. The next time I make this scrub, I will add more sugar or a little less oil.

• Click here for Whole Living‘s Citrus and Sugar Scrub recipe.

Freshly used coffee grounds are very versatile. They can be sprinkled over potted plants to add nutrients to the soil or used as a body scrub. You can use the grounds by themselves or combine them with other natural ingredients for a bright wake-up scrub. Photo By Dani Hurst.

Wake-Up Scrub

I cut this recipe in half, and it turned out really well. I substituted lavender essential oil for peppermint, and I used regular granulated sugar instead of turbinado. Unlike the first recipe, it was just the right consistency; a thick, grainy slush. This scrub does make more of a mess in the shower, and I wouldn’t advise rinsing it off into a drain that easily clogs because–unlike sugar–coffee grounds don’t dissolve in water. Also, both these scrubs contain oil, so be careful when using them in the shower if you don’t have a rubber mat because they make the floor slippery.

• Click here for Whole Living‘s Wake-Up Scrub recipe.

One of my favorite sections of a book I recently reviewed, Make Your Place: Affordable, Sustainable Nesting Skills by Raleigh Briggs, is the one about natural body care, which includes an entire page about homemade body scrubs. Here are a few from that list that use only ingredients you’ll probably already have on-hand. The instructions for these scrubs are the same: after combining ingredients, rub on your skin for about 20 seconds (or whatever feels good to you), then rinse well.

Sugar moistened with lemon juice
• Equal parts ground oatmeal and plain yogurt
Freshly used coffee grounds
Equal parts honey and ground almonds
Sea salt, a few drops of essential oil and enough olive oil to make a thick slush
A little plain yogurt mixed with the contents of one bag of green tea (about 1 tablespoon)

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