Home Spa: Lemon Bar Scrub

Have you ever read the back of some of the beauty products hanging out in your cabinet? Most of mine have multiple ingredients that I can't even pronounce much less know where they come from. As an organic food junkie, I recently started to feel like I'm neglecting a huge aspect of natural products: what I put on my skin.  

Oh sure, I buy J.R. Watkins "natural" hand soap from Target, but that's really more for the gorgeous packaging and scent. I don't even want to think about what's really in the mascara that I swipe on my eye lashes multiple times a week. Until I know what to do about that, at least I can feel good about this scrub.

Today is the first in a series of DIY home spa recipes I'll be sharing this month. This lemon bar sugar scrub, like the others that will follow, is a beauty treatment you can make at home with ordinary ingredients found in your kitchen cupboard or market. 

This scrub smells just heavenly, and it turns out things found in nature do a great job of exfoliating dead skin and adding a little life to your cuticles. Big plus? I can even pronounce all the ingredients.

I'm planning a post soon on all the reasons why I love grapeseed oil so much. It has practically replaced olive oil in my kitchen and is a perfect match for this scrub because it is such a light oil. Coconut oil is actually used in a lot of natural skin care lines. You can find both at any health food store.

Lemon Bar Sugar Scrub Recipe

You will need to make one brown sugar batch and one cane sugar batch using the same formula. Later you will layer these in the jars.

1. Mix 1/3 cup of coconut oil 1/3 grapeseed oil. Heat for 10 seconds in the microwave. This will break down the coconut oil so you can mix it with the grapeseed oil. Allow this to cool for a couple minutes.

2. Mix one and a half cups of cane sugar with the oil.

3. Add the juice and zest of one lemon and stir. Repeat this process with the brown sugar.

4. Spoon  brown sugar batch at the bottom of the container to look like the "crust" and the cane sugar batch to look like the "lemon filling".

To Use:

1. Run you hands under the faucet.

2. Scoop out a teaspoon and scrub hands gently for about 30 seconds.

3. Lather well with soap and rinse to remove the scrub.

The cute little jars came from Michaels. They were only $3 each. I gave one jar to my best friend as part of her birthday gift and put the other over my kitchen sink. It feels good to know that I'm using at least one homemade, natural product. (Ignoring the  mascara for now...) Plus, this is a lot cheaper than any scrub I'd find on the shelves at Sephora.

I'll have another DIY spa recipe this time next week to share. Have one of your own? I'd love to hear it in the comments section.