Important: While this facial scrub is made with largely natural ingredients, allergic reactions are always possible. Facial skin, especially around the eyes, is sensitive.

• Test a small area of skin in a less sensitive area, such as your arm, before applying it to your face.
• Avoid direct contact with the eyes or the mouth
• Those with nut allergies should use extra caution, as coconut oil is a primary ingredient

We originally used this scrub occasionally to treat irritated, very dry skin, serving as both an exfoliant and a moisturizer. Over time, one of us began using it daily with great results. Because coconut oil is the base, it can help or worsen acne depending on skin type and use. We do include castor oil and honey to help balance it. As with most skincare, results depend on context, since skin is highly personal. Let your skin’s response guide how often you use this scrub.

Let’s get to the ingredients

Here is what you will need:

• Dark Brown Sugar – 1 cup
• Coconut Oil – ½ cup
• Sea Salt – 1 tbsp
• Castor Oil -1 tbsp
• Vitamin E oil -1 tsp
• Arrowroot Powder – ½ tsp
• Dried Comfrey – ½ cup
• Honey – 1 tbsp
• Essential Oils – 30 drops +/-

The Why Breakdown

Each ingredient in this scrub serves a specific purpose. Some benefits are supported by research, others by long-standing traditional use. For us, the deciding factor is simple: it works.

Dark brown sugar provides gentle exfoliation, helping remove dead skin without being overly abrasive.

Sea salt adds exfoliating grit and helps reduce spoilage due to its natural preservative properties.

Coconut oil moisturizes and helps restore the skin barrier, making it especially useful for dry, irritated skin.

Castor oil balances coconut oil, offering anti-inflammatory and antibacterial properties.

Vitamin E oil helps prevent moisture loss, softens skin, and supports skin repair.

Honey helps draw moisture into the skin and offers anti-inflammatory and antibacterial benefits.

Comfrey helps soothe and soften skin and supports hydration.

Arrowroot powder reduces the greasy feel of the scrub and helps improve overall texture.

Essential oils add scent and provide aromatherapy benefits, depending on the oils selected.

We recommend using organic and all-natural sources to ensure they maintain their full strength. The reality is, though, that it can get cost-prohibitive for some. We have written a couple of articles about what organic means and what it doesn’t. If you need to cut costs, do so; we have at times as well and haven’t noticed a significant difference.

Essential Oils

Essential oils let you customize this scrub for your intended use. For a morning scrub, brighter scents like eucalyptus, lemongrass, and tea tree work well. For evening use, softer options such as chamomile, rose, and lavender are more calming.

Use caution when selecting oils. Some essential oils, including cinnamon, clove, and peppermint, can irritate sensitive skin and are unsafe if they come into contact with the eyes. If you are unsure about an oil, check a reliable reference before adding it to the mix.

The how

So, how do you make this? It is easy

1. Gather up all ingredients, including the essential oils
2. Place in a food processor
3. Pulse for 30 seconds
4. Scrape down sides
5. Pulse again for 30 seconds.

At this point, check it. It is very easy to overblend. To ensure this works correctly, keep blending to a minimum to preserve the grit of the sugar and salt. It should feel gritty like coarse sand. You may need to repeat steps 4 and 5 a couple more times.

Place this in a jar or other sealable container. Since brown sugar, honey, and salt are hygroscopic, they degrade by absorbing moisture from the air. You know what air in a bathroom has in it? Water! Keep it sealed to extend its shelf life.

Using it

When you want to use it, open the container, take out a teaspoonful, and use it as you would any other facial scrub. It is that simple.

A Side Note

If you are concerned about coconut oil, you could substitute an alternative oil, such as olive oil. In that case, we would recommend adding more arrowroot to the mix. Why is this needed? Coconut oil is firm enough at room temperature to retain its shape, whereas olive oil does not. Additional arrowroot or other thickener would be needed to solidify the mixture and prevent separation. We have not tried this ourselves but it would be a good experiment to try.

Wrapping Up

You know how to create your own facial scrub and tune it to your needs. While the ‘green goo’ isn’t the prettiest, it is highly effective and made with ingredients that are generally low-cost and have known health benefits. In addition, it is easy to make, smells good, and can make a decent homemade gift.

The post How To Make A Great Facial Scrub first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

We all know water is vital to life and health. In this post, we discuss our water needs and why it helps us manage our weight goals. After reading this post, we believe you will understand the need to be consistent with your water intake to help you meet your goals.

We’re Talking Management Not Diet

First, this is not a blog on diet or nutrition. Because there are several places you can learn how water affects or does not affect weight loss, we won’t discuss those specifics here. We would rather you take from this post that water is an integral part of making your goals attainable. We learned that being consistent with water helps keep our weight management consistent.

When approaching your goals through data you need to keep your water intake stable. For example, if you exercise you will also use water faster than if you don’t. When you exert yourself that water needs to be replenished. Not everyone may realize the same happens with digestion. Without proper hydration, your digestive processes may not be consistent. Because we are not experts, we will defer better-informed sources on the subjects.

• How Much Water To Drink Based On Your Weight
• Drinking Water Helps Weight Loss
• Why Water Is Important

Why is Consistency Important?

In our journey, we found water intake is important to properly understand weight management. As we learned in science class the human body is composed of 60% water. The water is stored in our blood, fat, digestive tract, skin, brain, etc. of our body. If you have been dehydrated you know there are signs that things are going wrong. You feel thirsty, lethargic, have cramps, or have a hard time getting food to, well, move along. As a result, we found if we weren’t consistent, our weight jumped around a lot more.

As an exercise, let’s do some water math. If you are 200 lbs. and are composed of 60% water, 120 lbs. of your weight is derived from water. What would happen if you go camping with friends and forget to pack enough water? Adding to the scenario, you do a little hiking on a hot day. You would expect the outcome would be that you become a little dehydrated but surely survivable. Becoming mildly dehydrated drops your water content to 58%. The delta between 60% and 58% is 2% resulting in 2.4 lbs. of water weight lost. All of that is fine but it does make for noisy and unreliable results tracking.

Don’t Believe Us?

Manipulating water intake in some sports is a way competitors use dehydration to drop 5%-10% of their body weight for a match. The technique is known as water cutting. What they use is intentional extreme dehydration over missing a few glasses but at its’ core, the principles are the same.

DO NOT TRY WATER CUTTING INTENTIONALLY TO LOSE WEIGHT ON YOUR OWN. IT IS DANGEROUS. PEOPLE HAVE DIED USING THIS TECHNIQUE.

When tracking our daily progress, hydration is a real problem we face with weight management. Our home scale won’t be able to distinguish what that 2.4 lbs. is. The reverse may happen if you over-hydrate afterwards. You may see a spike in weight gain. We had to learn to form good habits so we didn’t ride this rollercoaster.

Forming Good Water Habits

Eliminating the variable of water’s impact on weight is fairly easy; be consistent. Here are some simple steps to make that happen:

• Understand your water needs based on your body, exertion levels, and ambient temperatures.
• Find a container to hold that much water ( or a known quantity ).
• Divide the amount of water by some meaningful amount so it can be consumed during waking hours.
• Set a timer or reminder on your smartphone, kitchen timer, or other audible device.
• Every time the timer goes off, pour the amount of water you divided the day into a glass and drink it.

If this seems prescriptive and rigid it’s because at first, it is! Why?

This is building muscle memory and good habits. Habits are formed by repeating the same thing again and again over time. You’re making a positive life change here by forming this new habit but it takes repetition to stick.

Having the container helps because it is a visual record of how you are meeting your goals over the day. The goal here is consistency over time.

All Liquids Are Not Equal

One gotcha here worth talking about. Not all liquid is created equal. 24 oz of lemonade is not the same hydration as 24 oz of water. Lemonade, soda, and other liquids have other ingredients in them such as sugars, pulp, salts, etc. that don’t hydrate the same as water. It doesn’t mean don’t drink them but they may or may not bring other things to the party. We will discuss this more in a post on hidden calories.

Also, hydration needs for exercise, heat, digestion, etc. may cause the need for some daily changes to the amount you need. If you are doing a 10-mile hike in 80 F weather, you are going to need more water. Drink it. This point is to be consistent as much as possible but needs may spike from time to time.

Eliminating variables like water levels in your weight management journey helps you understand what your body is doing better. It makes your weigh-ins, which we will talk about later, more accurate and helpful.

You now have another tool for managing your weight should you choose to use it. Consistently drinking the water your body requires will make understanding what is impacting your weight easier. With most things, the goal is to create good habits so you recognize when you are deviating from them.

The post How To Be Consistent With Water first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.