A salt scrub is two ingredients. Coarse sea salt and a base oil. You mix them in a jar with roughly two parts salt to one part oil, and you keep the jar in the bathroom. That is the whole product. It will cost you perhaps three euros to make a jar that lasts two months, and it will work better than almost anything you can buy in a bottle.
I make scrub for the studio every few weeks. It takes ten minutes and there is no recipe to it beyond the ratio. I add a few drops of an essential oil — usually lavender, sometimes rosemary in winter — and that is it. Anything more elaborate is, in my experience, salesmanship.
When to use a salt scrub
Once a week is enough. Twice if your skin runs thick. Any more often than that and you will start to strip the skin instead of refreshing it; salt is a coarse abrasive and it does not need to be applied often to do its work.
Use it on damp skin, not dry. Standing in the shower with the water turned off is the right setup. The salt grinds against the skin under the oil, which is the texture you want — abrasion cushioned by lubrication. On dry skin the salt scratches. On wet skin under running water it slides off. Damp is the sweet spot.
Where to use it and where not
Use it everywhere from the collarbones down. Concentrate on the parts of the body that get thick and dry — the elbows, the knees, the heels, the upper arms. Spend a little extra time on each. Skip the face entirely; the salt is too coarse and the face needs gentler exfoliants.
Do not use it on any patch of skin that is shaved within the last twelve hours, or any patch that is broken. The salt will burn and you will regret it for the next two days.
The aftermath
Rinse with warm water — not hot — and do not soap the body afterward. The oil from the scrub leaves a thin film on the skin, and that film is part of the point; it locks in moisture as the skin air-dries. Towel off lightly, by patting rather than rubbing. Skin should feel slightly silky for the rest of the day.
I have one client who uses scrub the night before a long day of meetings. She says it puts her in a kind of standby state for the next morning — the skin feeling slightly different, slightly attended to, is a small reminder all day that the body is there. I have started doing the same thing.
The cheapest scrub you make yourself works better than any of the expensive ones. The bottle does almost nothing the salt does not.
