Sugar and salt look interchangeable in a jar. They are not. Sugar is a softer abrasive — the granules round off more quickly under water — and it is the right exfoliant for any skin that is thinner, more reactive, or younger than salt would suit. We use both in the studio. Which one ends up on the body depends on the body.
I generally use sugar on the chest, on the face of the décolletage, on the inside of the upper arms, and on anyone who is in their early twenties or whose skin has thinned for any reason — hormonal changes, certain medications, a winter of poor sleep. The salt sits in a different jar for everyone else.
The ratio
Two parts brown sugar to one part oil. Brown rather than white, because the molasses content adds a small humectant quality that white sugar lacks. The oil can be anything that suits you — sweet almond, jojoba, fractionated coconut, even a good olive oil from your kitchen if that is what you have. I tend to use a half-and-half of almond and jojoba in the studio because they are forgiving on almost every skin type.
Mix in a jar. Add a few drops of essential oil if you like — vanilla absolute works particularly well with sugar, as does sweet orange — and that is the entire product. It will keep for about a month in the bathroom; longer if you store it cooler.
How to use it
On damp skin in the shower, the same as a salt scrub. The technique is identical. The difference is in how the body responds. Where salt leaves the skin feeling stripped-and-then-buffed, sugar leaves it feeling polished without the strip. There is no burn on sensitive areas. The skin feels less raw afterward.
A practice for the chest and shoulders
I use sugar scrub once a week on the upper chest and the front of the shoulders. This region of skin is, for most people, the second most-photographed part of the body after the face, and it almost never gets exfoliated. It usually carries the marks of a year — the small bumps, the dull surface, the slightly uneven tone. A weekly sugar scrub, over a couple of months, brings this area back to looking like it belongs to the same person as the face.
It is a small, almost trivial change. The cumulative effect, over a year, is not trivial. Skin that is regularly tended looks tended. Skin that is ignored looks ignored. The difference shows up in photographs and, more usefully, in how the body feels when you put on a piece of clothing that touches it.
Sugar is for the skin that salt would scrape. Choose the abrasive that suits the surface.
If you have only one jar in your bathroom, make it sugar. It works on almost everyone. Salt is a more specialised tool.
