Giving Yourself a 10 Minute Spa Day Every Day

I am incredibly busy, but I do like the little treats for myself. My favorite thing is making sugar scrubs for in the shower. My favorites: gingerbread, chocolate almond, and ginger. I've been trolling http://www.bathandbodyrecipes.com/ and then branching out into my own concoctions. Bubble baths are also so much more incredible when you make it a tea bath or milk bath or add homemade bath salts or bath oils. Get 2-cup plastic containers from the store that have screw on lids which cost only $2-$3 for a pack of 3, and you have a safe, convenient, and inexpensive container too. Similar scrubs cost $15-$25 at bath and beauty stores, even more when you go to high end beauty counters, but you can make them for only a couple dollars. Finding organic ones is incredibly difficult, but you can easily find the organic components yourself. So arm yourself with a good quality light oil such as grapeseed, almond, apricot kernel, or jojoba, some sugar, and some add-ins, and make your shower time an incredible, aromatic experience that will exfoliate your skin while simultaneously pushing moisturizers into your skin.

Note: oils do have scents, except grapeseed oil. Grapeseed oil is my preferred sugar scrub oil because it doesn't compete with what I'm adding to it, but other oils work well with different scents. In a chocolate sugar scrub, coconut oil, almond oil, and macadamia oil are certainly good options, but coconut oil and gingerbread spices aren't such a great combination.

Gingerbread Sugar Scrub
1/2 c. light brown sugar
1/2 c. white sugar
1/2 c. - 3/4 c. massage oil
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp ginger
1 tsp nutmeg
1/2 tsp cloves
1/2 tsp allspice
(all spices are ground)
Mix everything together, adding just enough oil to make a paste. When the scrub sits for a day or two, it's okay for there to be a thin layer of oil on top, just stir it back into the sugar, but the paste shouldn't be loose or sloppy/gloppy.

Chocolate Almond Sugar Scrub
1 c. white sugar
1/2 c. - 3/4 c. massage oil
1 tsp - 2 tsp almond extract
1 T cocoa powder
Mix everything together, adding just enough oil to make a paste. When the scrub sits for a day or two, it's okay for there to be a thin layer of oil on top, just stir it back into the sugar, but the paste shouldn't be loose or sloppy/gloppy.

These are also child safe, so when I let my young children use these scrubs on their chapped hands, it's okay that they taste these or that they eat food after using them on their hands.