For Christmas, I decided to make my mothers gifts spa-themed. In addition to giving her some store-bought facial masks and emery boards, I also gave her some homemade body scrubs. Store bought scrubs are not -that- cheap, and for the most part, you have no idea exactly what all those weird sounding ingredients are. I did sugar/oil and banana/sugar scrubs. I found these nice little glass bowls with plastic lids in the kitchen storage aisle of my local grocery store to put the scrubs in.

The first one, the sugar/oil was very basic. 1 cup of sugar (I used organic cane sugar which was on sale for cheaper than regular white sugar, was was great) to 1 cup of oil. I used olive oil, although you can use other oils such as grapeseed, sunflower, canola, etc. Vitamin E oil would be great to use, but because its rather expensive, I would use just a small amount in addition to another oil. Stir it up, and voilà, a simple scrub that works just as well as those store bought ones.

The banana scrub was also very simple. 1 banana to 3 tablespoons of sugar and 1/4 teaspoon of vanilla for a nice added scent. Blend together. An electric hand mixer makes this easy-peasy.

Here are the websites I browse through when looking for homemade beauty ideas (th efirst one is where I got the banana scrub from)

http://www.treehugger.com/organic-beauty/8-homemade-salt-and-sugar-body-scrubs.html

http://www.natural-homeremedies-for-life.com/homemade-facial-masks.html

 http://allnaturalbeauty.us/hbr_ingredients.htm

http://www.pioneerthinking.com/beauty/