Adventures in cosmetics

That's about the best three-word title I can come up with. Though what I made last night maybe isn't literally cosmetics.

I did make the sugar scrub. I ventured out to the health-food store (they DO have a few food items, but not the stuff I generally buy, and they DO sell a lot of supplements. But they had the essential oil, which is what I was looking for)

Essential oils aren't cheap (I paid $10 for an ounce of lavender, which is surely not the most exotic one a person can buy), but it only takes a few drops for something like this.

(And on the bottle of the lavender oil, it said you can also mix a few drops with a few drops of peppermint - and I have MUCH PEPPERMINT OIL, thanks to buying it to use as mouse repellant - and mixing them with a "neutral" unscented oil, and rubbing it into the temples to alleviate headaches. While I'm not sure I'd want to do that for a migraine (all smells bother me when I have one), I think it might help a lot with a plain-old allergies headache or a tension headache).

So: 2/3 a cup each of brown and white sugar (I contemplated using turbinado sugar in place of brown, because it's coarser, but turbinado sugar is also a lot more expensive. And I don't want to waste what I have because it's what I put in tea, when I put sugar in my tea). I didn't measure the olive oil. (I mixed the stuff in a metal bowl, rather than in the jar I was going to store it in). Then I added maybe 1/2 t vanilla (all that was left in the "old" bottle of it) and 3 drops of the lavender.

I wound up putting the mix in an old jar I had saved - it had once held a rosemary/clary sage/lavender bath salt, and it was a nice jar, and I also thought that I'd eventually buy some plain epsom salts and maybe some essential oils and make my own scented bath salts. I figured if any of the residual scent (and there was some) in the jar was picked up by the scrub, all the better.

The scrub actually works really well. This delights me, because the scrub is cheap, can be made from stuff around the house (now that I have the essential oil...), and it is less harsh on my skin than other commercial exfoliants I've tried. (I have to be careful as my skin is somewhat delicate, I've found). I can even use it on my face without any problems.

Also, the olive oil helps with the dry skin issues. I bet if a person had sweet almond oil, mixing some of that in with the olive oil would make it even better...