Body & Facial Scrubs: How to Make Salt and Sugar Scrubs

Difficulty: Easy

Time Required: 10 minutes

Here's How:

• For this body scrub, you can use salt or sugar. Sugar can be gentler on the skin. Just make sure to choose a sugar or salt that has small granules that won't tear at skin. A basic table salt or sugar works wonderfully. If you have super sensitive skin, you might opt for a dark brown sugar.
• Choose an oil. You can use baby oil or any of the following: organic extra virgin coconut oil (my absolute favorite, which you can buy at a health food store), almond oil, safflower, vegetable. According to Allure, makeup artist Joanna Schlip uses olive oil in the homemade scrubs she uses on actress Eva Longoria.
•  You want 1 part oil to 2 parts sugar or salt. Place anywhere from a few tablespoons to a cup of salt or sugar in a container. Place half that amount of oil. Mix with a spoon. Don't freak out if the salt settles to the bottom. It's virtually impossible to keep it mixed.
•  If you want your scrub to smell divine, put 5 drops of an essential oil into your mixture. Mix with spoon. Or do what actress Cate Blanchett does and put in mint (muddle it up first or put in a blender) and lemon zest. See my list of essential oils.
• Now onto the bath itself. I find scrubs work best on dry skin. Step into a bath tub and put on loofah mitts. I like the exfoliating gloves that you get in health food stores. They work very well to scrub away the top layer of dead skin cells, leaving your skin feeling super soft. If you don't have a bath mitt, don't worry, you can use your hands.
• Take a spoonful of the mixture into your palms or your gloves and then rub the mixture all over your body in a circular motion. For tougher areas such as the knees, soles and elbows, spend extra scrubbing time or cut a lemon in half and pour sea salt on the halves, scrubbing your soles, elbows and knees with the lemon. On places like the chest, neck, and stomach, where the skin is thinner, take it easy with the scrubbing and instead use cleanser on a washcloth to exfoliate. If you feel the salt is too harsh on your skin, rinse off the bath mitts and then spoon only the oil onto the mitts to continue. Find out the right way to give yourself a body scrub in my next post.
• Once entire body is scrubbed well, rinse thoroughly.
• Pat skin dry. You should be good and cleansed. The salt (or sugar) should have exfoliated your skin nicely with the help of the loofah and the oil should leave skin soft and moisturized. You shouldn't even need to follow the bath with a moisturizer.
• The only bad part about this scrub is the oil can build up on the bathtub bottom. Make sure to clean it up so the next person who gets in doesn't slip.