Wild Beauty: Spiced Rooibos Tea Sugar Scrub
This is a monthly guest series called Wild Beauty by Heather Mulholland! Check out past posts here.
Anyone else excited for the holiday season? It may be a bit early to think about holiday gifts (who am I kidding right?), but when it comes to homemade gifts the earlier you start thinking about them the better. If you’re like me, you spend most of your working hours browsing through Pinterest and you will have seen scrubs are a huge hit lately. They are easy to make at home, giving anyone that luxurious spa feeling in their own bathroom; now only if we can convince our significant others to give us a massage afterwards! The scrub I’m showing you today is full of Ayurvedic properties and antioxidants giving our skin a healthy boost to making it look radiant.
Rooibos tea is one of those unknown beauties. You see it on the grocery store shelf nestled between Red Rose and English Breakfast, it has such an exotic name that I find people don’t give it a chance. Rooibos is a South African broom-like plant within the legume family, brewed as a bright red tisane, usually taken in the same manner as black tea. The tea is chock full of antioxidants like asapalathin and nothofagin with no caffeine. The term antioxidants are thrown around in today’s health word, so much that we may not know exactly how it helps; essentially they are nutrients and enzymes that can help prevent and repair damage to our body’s tissue. As our body ages our skin is affected by a form of oxidation. Think back to when you cut up an apple for a snack, the creamy flesh starts to brown when exposed to the air. That’s oxidation and antioxidants can reduce those effects.
Cinnamon and ginger are Ayurvedic spices that help your circulation and detox your lymph system, I won’t go much into them here, since they will come up in a later post, but I wanted to give a brief note why I’ve included them in the scrub.
- 1/3 cup of sugar
- 1 tbsp Rooibos Tea
- 1/2 tbsp ground cinnamon
- 1/2 tbsp ground ginger
- 1/3 cup liquid oil – either almond, avocado, olive, or coconut
- Pour the dry ingredients into a bowl, mix together.
- Add your oil and mix together, it shouldn’t be to dry or two wet. If the mixture is dripping off your spoon, it’s too wet.
- Store in a container with a tight fitting lid and use whenever you feel the urge for a spa night!
- To use – Take about 1 tbsp at a time and scrub on your skin in a circular fashion and rinse off. I find it best to do in the shower and you may need to rub a little bit harder to get the cinnamon/ginger off your skin (or with the towel), I find it sticks a bit with the oil.
- The above amount makes enough for your entire body, once.
Enjoy!
Colleen / Inspired to Share
This looks amazing! Lovely photos.