Exfoliating Scrub Recipes - Holy shit, coconut oil

Exfoliating Scrub Recipes, adding Rosemary to my skincare arsenal and:

 Holy shit, coconut oil. Why you never have to buy a scrub from a drugstore ever again.

February 16th, 2013

(Skip to the pictures for the recipes, y'lazy goob)

It's the weekend, so obviously after my morning volunteer run-through at the Offenburg Animal Shelter (Tierheim, german word for the day. Tiergarten is zoo. Tier means animal. You got it. ) I get home, super lively at around 2pm, buzzing to do something crafty. Since Saturday is the country-wide errand-running day because there apparently is no German word for 'convenience', grocery shopping is done, then I get going on household tasks such as laundry, cleaning up my room and doing some weekly cat-grooming, which lately, translates into digging into my older cat's ears that are so gross with ear-mite dust I finish looking like a coal miner. If you have animals, and they ever get ear mites, just prepare to go spelunking in their ears for about a month-long cycle of medication. Wear goggles.

So I'm done all my buzzing around with chores and I start to browse pinterest, and I find all these cool fancy recipes for at-home exfoliants. This was on my list of things to try for a while, and since my coconut oil finally arrived in the mail (cause' amazon is the answer to giving up search for products/food items in Germany) I jumped at the chance to try it.

Now sure, lots of recipes call for special ingredients, like that damn raw honey I keep seeing everywhere. Sorry pinterest, I don't want to buy a 50ml pot of your damn raw honey for 30 euros. NOPE. Same goes for finding fresh herbs  and using sea salt, or sugar in the raw. These aren't hard to find, nor very expensive, but really? Do I specifically need sea salt? I don't have any of these in the house, and I wasn't about to go out again on a second grocery trip, so fuck it.


Why fancy scrubs are horse shit

If you want to buy lots of fancy scrubs because you dig the smell, you collect them, you just love em' for whatever reason and don't care about what they have in them or what they do, then awesome. There are tons of awesome-smelling, beneficial and great products out there, but as my skin is angry and reactive, so am I, reactive to the cosmetic industry taking my money and playing me like a FIDDLE. Over the last few months of my skin-care voyage I have noted the golden household ingredients for healthy, soft, 'glowing' skin. Despite the use of many adjectives such as glowing, radiant, perfect, luscious  for what you skin should be, and many more adjectives of what the products actually do such as, rejuvenate  refresh, cleanse, fortify, nourish, hydrate, repair, or my personal favorite: invigorate, (I mean what the hell does that even mean? How do you figuratively give strength and energy to your hair or skin? ) they all basically mean the same thing. In fact, according to the handy google dictionary: Fortify, strengthen, refresh, rejuvenate  nourish, and invigorate, are all synonyms of each other, that mean: "to Give strength or energy to" You think you're so godamn clever don't you P&G. This is what every one of those words mean, no matter what is in the bottle:


Soft 
Even toned in appearance 
Firm
Clean


Overall, these are the trademarks of healthy skin, what millions of people strive for. I'm not a doctor or a skin-expert, but really that's what it comes down to as a person who has contributed a great deal to the multi-billion dollar cosmetic industry, trying to find that miracle product. So when we break it down to find the things that improve the appearance and feel of our skin in the ways that the common consumer is after, I can confidently recommend the following:

Awesome, cheap, easy-to-find, and natural (for my hippy pals) products

Lemons/Lemon Juice - evens skin tone, is an astringent, which means it cleans and disinfects very well
Honey - evens skin tone, corrects scarring/blemishes/impurities, softens, also great for hair growth/softness/damage repair (though the only cure for split ends is to cut them off) and shine, also doubles as a snack when you put it on your face
Coffee Grounds - greatly improves elasticity, evens skin tone, awesome for wrinkles and cellulite (note, there is no 'cure' for cellulite. Sorry ladies, we gotta learn to love our bumps)
Clear Aloe Vera Gel - Awesome for the scalp, hair growth, and mild burns (obvs) always remember your scalp is part of our skin, and needs attention
Coconut oil - Awesome for godamn everything I just listed. Oil should be a base ingredient in everything you make for your skin. 

Disregard following paragraph if you are unwilling to pay more than 5 euros for 25ml of product or go on a prolonged search for specific item that may or may not be possible to find in the entire country of Germany, not even in the damn pharmacy

Additional splurgey skincare item: 
Pure Vitamin E oil - softens, corrects scarring/blemishes/impurities, improves elasticity. It comes in really small quanities and has a consistency like honey, the results are similar but the vitamin E oil provided a much stronger and more noticeable difference in my skin tone. I used it for some chicken pox scars and I use it when my mustache-flare ups die down to help heal the skin, it works really well.

All the listed items above contribute to 3 types of drugstore scrubs:

1. The sexy, soft, silky skin scrub = Firm, even-toned, smooth, calming scents
2. The wake-you-up, refreshing, rejuvenating scrub = firm, even-toned, smooth, stimulating ingredients such as caffeine or citrus
3. The exotic/rare cellulite magic - firm, even-toned, smooth, probably has salt from the dead sea in it.

They all do the same shit, the only real difference in what these items do for you is whether they stimulate your senses or calm you down. I'm not saying that any product is better than the other, nor am I refuting the idea that salt from the dead sea is beneficial to your skin, I'm just saying that if you are like me and stand in the drug store aisle, with "nourishing scrub" in one hand and "invigorating scrub" in the other hand like you are trying to dismantle a bomb, thinking frantically to yourself "well I want to nourish my skin but...if I nourish it how will I invigorate it?!" you don't have to worry, cause they're pretty much all the same, and how each product affects your skin is up to your skin. TL;DR - The cosmetic industry is a thirsty bitch

So I decided to use these ingredients and a few more that I found while browsing through the recipes to make my own exfoliants at home, but before I list them, let me tell you how amazing coconut oil is.

I didn't really expect what I got in the mail, I was thinking it would look like cooking oil but it doesn't, coconut oil actually normally comes in jars because it normally solid. Like if you left bacon grease in a pan overnight (don't ever do that) to dry. It will melt on your skin just by rubbing it in, but if you are using it for your hair, (which you SHOULD) I recommend popping a little bowl of it in the microwave for about 20 seconds. Last night I massaged about 2 tablespoons worth into my scalp and onto the ends of my hair, combed it all through and fell asleep with it in. I woke up, washed my hair as normal, and was delighted to see extremely soft, light, smooth and shiny hair. This alone makes it a keeper for me.It worked wonder on my broken ends, and I couldn't stop running my hands through my hair afterwards.God, it's so good, get some and just slather it all over your body then bask in it on your bed naked like a well-oiled snake. So obviously when I fell in love with how it treated my hair, I needed to try it on my skin. Obviously. Here are two recipes that I made, one is stimulating, the other is calming.

Why exfoliating is good:
1. Improves circulation in skin. Good circulation = less wrinkles, firmer skin, even skin tone
2. Gets rid of dead skin and makes way for new baby smooth skin
3. It feels like naked angels are rubbing you all over with ground up ecstasy

1. Coffee Grounds Scrub
 (If I were selling it retail, I'd probably call it "organic-rejuvenating morning-burst-cellulite-magic" and sell it for 25 euros a jar.)

Don't mind my ultra-ghetto labels.

Don't use this one on your face, it's way too harsh. Unless your face is made by nokia.

1. half a cup of coffee grounds. You can use used or unused, made it with fresh grounds.
2. half a cup of sugar. I used brown sugar because the crystals are larger than white sugar, so they are rougher and soak up more of the oil.
3. half cup of coconut oil
4. quarter cup of olive oil

The result: 
Skin-gasms and insanely soft skin. I presume it is the caffeine making my skin tingle. Seriously, it felt amazing rubbing it on, like a massage. I think that also might be because of how rough the scrub is. I did take a picture of my cellulite-spot, after a week or so I'll see how it effects it, because I think this would be really great to use in the morning to wake up my body. But I won't bother you with my orange-peel bum until after the test.

2. Rosemary, Honey, Ginger, Coconut, Lemon

Pretty much says it right in the title. This one you can use on your face, I didn't try it because my mustache just cleared up and I don't want to risk angering it.

I was experimenting with this one. I wanted to make a scrub more for relaxing, since the coffee scrub was the opposite of calming. So I did some research and found that Rosemary is also a very popular candidate in the at-home beauty-recipe world. There are lots of ways to use it, essential oil, fresh or dried, even ground up. I had some dried at home, which appealed to me because it was already in my house, so I used that. You can grab fresh rosemary and chop it up for this recipe, but you'd be making the extra trip to the store pretty much just for the extra strong scent, and I'd call you a goob. Rosemary as an herb is an astringent, whereas the oil tones and firms skin, improving it's elasticity. Because it is an astringent, it clears excess oil from where it's used, which makes it great for skin/hair, as well as it's disinfecting properties that make it great for treating skin conditions like eczema and acne. It also smells incredible, similar to lavender (I think anyway) and is often used to calm the senses through aromatherapy, despite the fact that it is actually considered a strong stimulant.

So when I decided to use rosemary I added a few ingredients that I thought would go along with it.

1. Half a cup of rosemary
2. 1-1.5 cups of salt
3. half a cup of coconut oil
4. 2 tbsp lemon juice
5. 1 teaspoon ginger
6. 2 teaspoons honey

I added a bit of brown sugar near the end to help soak up some of the excess oil.

The Result:

Smells awesome, my skin is soft, and I am relaxed, but my skin is feeling tingly and clean. It's the kind of refreshing feeling that is good for bed, not quite as stimulating as the coffee recipe. This recipe smells great and I don't have to worry about my skin flaring up since all the ingredients are already compatible with my skin, which makes it go great with a calming bubble bath.  I added the ginger because of how much I liked it when added to my detox bath last week, it proved beneficial yet again and added to the scent. The rosemary seems to have actually improved my skin tone only slightly with one use, which makes me optimistic, and I'll be adding it to my collection.

I will continue to make scrubs, I think it's really fun experimenting with various ingredients, especially since my first attempts were a success, and I want to see what other kinds of scents and textures I can come up with. I don't think I'll ever buy a scrub from a drugstore again, and neither will you, hopefully after reading this you will realize that you are a strong, independant hairless mammal, who takes care of it's weak outer layer, who don't need no fancy adjectives.