How to make the best homemade DIY chocolate orange sugar hand scrub - This refreshing recipe is quick and easy with essential oils, brown and white sugar, and cocoa powder for a healing deep clean that is moisturizing and exfoliating.
We had a pamper yourself day at MOPS last week. There were stations set up around the room with massage chairs and nail polish and assorted paraphernalia.
One of the areas was a craft station where we made hand scrubs. I'm not a hand scrub kind of person. I think I still have two salt scrubs that I bought for myself in my teen years.
Or maybe I purged them in the last great bathroom decluttering.
Probably the latter.
At any rate, I was pretty excited to make a scrub and give it to my mother, whose skin has been decimated by chemo. And then I smelled it and decided that Grace would like it.
And then I used it to wash my hands (because I was wiping off the jar I'd poured it into). I hated the gritty, dirty way it made my hands feel. Gross.
I thought about throwing the whole thing in the trash or bringing it home and rinsing it down the drain.
But then I rinsed them off. It was magical. My hands were soft and smooth and smelled like chocolate orange.
How about that, I thought.
Dirt under my fingernails straight through to nice and soft and pretty smelling in twenty seconds!
It was then I knew I'd have to share the recipe with you.
I made my mom a jar of chocolate orange hand scrub, but I haven't shared my jar with anybody.
Every day, I work out in the garden (without gloves because they impede me). My nails get dirty and gross, and my skin gets covered with soil. I come in the house and wash my hands twice with liquid hand soap to get all the dirt off. I scoop a bit of my chocolate orange scrub out of the jar. I rub it into my fingernails and cuticles. I rub it into my palms and the heels of my hands and all over the backs of my hands. I rub it into the wrinkles of my knuckles and into my fingernails and cuticles again.
Then I rinse and my hands feel and look like they've never seen a garden. Ever.
It's like magic. It is magic.
I don't know how it works. I guess the sugar is a mild abrasive and removes the dead skin and dirt, and the oil soaks in and plumps up your freshly cleaned skin cells? That's just a guess.
I tried to find this recipe online, and I didn't have any luck. I did find a similar recipe labeled as a lip scrub, so I think this one would work for that, too.
Homemade DIY Chocolate Orange Hand Scrub Recipe
Equipment
- measuring cups & spoons
- half-pint jar
Materials
- 2 heaping tablespoons cocoa powder
- ½ cups brown sugar
- ⅓ cups white sugar
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- ⅓ cups olive oil Get something cheap. You aren't eating it; you don't need EVOO.
- 2-3 tablespoons sweet orange essential oil (Be careful with this if you don't want it to be very orangey. You might want to add it in smaller amounts and evaluate. I did use this much, but it wasn't a premium brand.)
Instructions
- Mix everything but the oils in a small bowl. Add olive oil a tablespoon or two at a time, until the consistency is right. I like mine to be thin, like pudding, so I used quite a bit of oil.
- After the consistency is right, add the essential oil. Use your nose as a guide. You'll know when you have enough.
- Mix it up really well.
- Pour or spoon it into a half-pint jar.
If you haven't gotten your mother anything for Mother's Day yet, you could throw this together in five minutes. If you don't have essential oils, skip them. The cocoa powder will still give you a nice scent.
Emma (My Little 3 and Me) says
Oooh this sounds really lush. I think my daughter would love to make this. Thanks for a great idea. (Think I'd want to eat it!)
Tara Ziegmont says
I can't lie. Every time I wash my hands, I want to go grab a piece of chocolate.