I love a good body scrub, don’t you? But I hate paying big bucks for them. Especially when I can just make them at home. The added benefit of making my own scrubs is that I know exactly what’s in them (which is super important, in my humble opinion). Skip to the easy DIY sugar scrub recipe.
Easy DIY Essential Oil Coconut Oil Sugar Scrub
Although most of us (myself included) use scrubs for vanity purposed (who doesn’t want butter soft skin?!), there are actually some pretty awesome health benefits.
Increased Circulation
They remove dead skin cells, help to boost circulation, and even assist in draining your lymph nodes, which helps increase blood flow to the surface of your skin. Pretty cool, huh?
Now when your hubby bangs on the door because the kids are screaming, you can tell him that you’re working on improving your circulation so that you don’t keel over. Okay, maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration…but body scrubs are really good for you. You should definitely get on board if you haven’t already.
Now, I’ll admit that I used to just buy my body scrubs. But then we went Paleo, and I suddenly had an abundance of granulated sugar that we wouldn’t be eating. And, being me, I couldn’t just throw it out.
So I decided to experiment with making my own sugar scrub. The first few batches completely sucked. I’m going to be honest here. They were either too scratchy (yes, that’s a thing), or they were way too oily, and I felt like I was walking around with a coconut oil film. I think it was my third attempt that I actually got it right.
Coconut Oil Sugar Scrub
- 1/3 cup granulated sugar
- 1/2 cup coconut oil (To get more information about Coconut Oil health benefits, read this article from Nutri Inspector!)
- 10 drops of your favorite Essential Oil
Add all of your ingredients to a glass jar* and gently stir. Do yourself a favor and don’t heat your coconut oil, since that will dissolve the sugar. Trust me on this one. It’s a sticky, unusable mess…or at least, that’s what happened to me….
Gently stir everything together and you’re good to go! Make sure that you store this in a cool, dark place out of direct sunlight (again…you don’t want to melt the oil and dissolve the sugar).
Need some help deciding which Essential Oils to use? Here are my favorites:
Invigorating
- Lemon
- Grapefruit
- Citrus Fresh
- Peppermint
Relaxing
- Lavender
- Stress Away
- Cedarwood
Of course, you can use any Essential Oils that strike your fancy. I’m just a creature of habit.
Now, I’ve talked before about why I won’t use coconut oil on my face (and I stand by this, with the exception of using it as an eye makeup remover), so I use this scrub on the rest of my body. I keep a GoToob in the shower* and my glass jar by my kitchen sink.
*if you’re clumsy (like me), you may not feel comfortable taking a glass jar in the shower. I get it. As long as you’re not using citrus oils in your scrub, you should be fine to use BPA free GoToobs to safely store your sugar scrub.