How to Save Money on Your Beauty Routine With Home-Made Facial Scrubs

Exfoliation is an important part of any skin care routine – it helps remove dead skin cells, making your skin look younger, smoother, and more radiant. If you go to any beauty counter, you will be able to find numerous different exfoliation products, with various properties, and with prices ranging from reasonable to exorbitant.

Or, you could just go into your kitchen, and mix up a home-made facial scrub in a few minutes, customized to your needs, and costing only pennies per use.

Exfoliation falls into two main categories – chemical and mechanical.

• Chemical exfoliators typically contain some sort of acid, which penetrates the skin and breaks down the bonds holding dry, rough, surface skin cells in place, so that they can be easily washed away.
• Mechanical exfoliators contain a mild abrasive, which physically removes the outer layer of dead skin through gentle scrubbing.

Your home-made facial scrub can contain either one, or a combination of the two.

Quick and easy:

The easiest scrub you can make it one that combines your current cleansing gel or cream with a mild abrasive. While washing your face in the evening, once or twice a week add a tablespoon or so of one of the following ingredients:

• baking soda (extremely fine-grained abrasive, polishes your skin til it glows)
• sugar
• salt

Or, once you’ve finished cleansing at night, you can opt for chemical exfoliation, applying one of the following with a cotton ball:

• apple juice
• grape juice
• lemon juice
• lime juice

You can leave it on for 20 minutes, and then rinse it off and apply your regular night cream, or you can choose to leave it on all night, and rinse it off in the morning. All of these juices are sources of alpha hydroxy acid, and may over time result in more rapid cell turnover, increased collagen production, and even a reduction in discoloration.

Facial scrub recipes:

The following recipes should be used as follows, once or twice each week at the end of the day:

• cleanse skin normally, using a gentle cleanser;
• apply scrub, and rub gently across entire face (and neck and chest, if convenient), avoiding eyes, and emphasizing the area around the nose and forehead, for about a minute;
• leave on for another few minutes before rinsing off with lukewarm water;
• dry face gently with towel, and
• promptly apply night cream.

1) 1 tbsp honey, 1 tbsp ground oatmeal, a few drops of tea tree oil

• Besides being a mild antiseptic, honey is also an excellent moisturizing agent and natural cleanser.
• Oatmeal is a mild abrasive, and soothes irritated skin through its anti-inflammatory properties

2) 1 tbsp olive oil, 1 tbsp sugar

• Extra virgin olive oil is a wonderful moisturizer, and is also highly anti-oxidant and anti-inflammatory
• Sugar is a mild abrasive AND a source of glycolic acid

3) 1 tbsp lime juice, 1 tbsp turmeric, 1 tbsp honey

• Lime cleans, refreshes and clarifies, and is a wonderful treatment for either dry or oily skin.
• Turmeric is mildly abrasive, has antiseptic properties, enhances skin tone, and gets rid of blemishes.