Homemade Olive Oil & Lemon Sugar Scrub Recipe
Exfoliate your skin on a budget with this super simple body scrub recipe!
Three simple ingredients can come together to give you soft, silky legs. The scrub recipe on this page is a wonderful scrub for using before and after shaving. Enjoy it on any of the tougher parts of your body – arms, elbows, legs, feet, etc., but do avoid sensitive areas of skin such as your face and any areas of your body that may be affected by acne.
Ingredients:
- Granulated Sugar
- Olive Oil
- Fresh Lemon
Make this scrub immediately before use. Since you’re using fresh lemon, it’s best not to make large batches for saving.
I’m not one for using exact measurements, but I would suggest starting with about 1/2 cup of sugar. Put the sugar in a small plastic bowl or jar, and add enough olive oil to saturate the sugar without excess oil floating over the top of the sugar. You’ll need to stir up this mixture to determine if you’ve got enough oil in the sugar. Next, quarter an entire lemon and squeeze all that citrusy goodness into the mixture. Stir it up again. Now you’re ready to go!
The Exfoliation:
- Soak legs in a warm bath or allow them to become saturated in a warm shower
- Scrub legs and feet thoroughly with scrub (and any other tougher areas of skin like your elbows)
- Rinse away scrub with warm water
At this point you have a couple of options:
- Take a tiny bit of body wash in your hands, lather it up, and quickly run it up and down your legs/feet and any areas of skin you’ve used the scrub on (don’t over wash). Quickly rinse away the body wash. This step will rinse away the excess oil and leave you soft and silky but free from the greasy feel we often experience with oil based scrubs.
- If you are shaving on the day of your scrub, follow all of the exfoliation steps above, shave, exfoliate with the scrub again, rinse – then proceed with step 1 above.
A few things worth mentioning:
Being a licensed skin therapist, I see a lot of misinformation floating around the Internet. Though many homemade skin treatments feel good, they often don’t perform much more than superficially.
That said, when the skin on my legs is dry and flaky, I’m not all too worried about the deeper scientific meaning surrounding it – I just want to fix the cosmetic problem at that moment.
So with all this duly noted, no, olive oil isn’t going to penetrate deeply into your skin and create a magical lifelong change. What it will do is soften the surface of your skin and create a barrier that assists in maintaining moisture levels in your skin.
The reason for sugar over salt: Salt is often rougher and more drying to the skin. Granulated sugar is more hydrating and less abrasive than coarse salt. The lemon juice, although acidic, is not terribly concentrated in this mixture. It will aid in exfoliation and give a refreshing feel to the skin, and you may experience some minor improvement in certain skin conditions, but just as noted above, it isn’t going to be a magical cure to excessive dry skin.
They key here is frequency!
Performing this scrub once a week will keep your skin nicely exfoliated, and restore moisture to the drier superficial layers of skin (the ones we see, touch, and feel).
You will feel a noticeable difference in the texture, smoothness, and glow of your skin after just one application, but to maintain this wonderful softness, you can’t just do it once!
Shoot for weekly if you possibly can.
Oh, and a few words of caution!
- Oil makes the bath tub slippery… So be careful, will ya!?
- Oils and all the other random stuff we wash down our drains everyday definitely can create clogs. Keep your drains nice and clean with a monthly drain cleaner treatment – and always run some extremely hot water down your drain for a minute or so after using an oil scrub.