Shea Butter Sugar Scrub Sunday

So I was browsing Etsy recently and found a really nice shop selling really scrummy-sounding sugar scrubs. I was thisclose to treating myself when I remembered I had pretty much all the ingredients to make my own and decided that would be much more fun and rewarding. It didn't take long to find a good, simple recipe online and I already have so much more shea butter than I could ever get through otherwise, so I decided to give it a go this afternoon.



This is the recipe I used (found here):

1/2 cup of shea butter
1/3 cup of carrier oil (I used grapeseed oil)
1/8 teaspoon of vitamin E oil (this is optional but I have some so I stuck it in)
1 teaspoon corn flour (this stops the butter being quite so greasy)
Essential/fragrance oil
1 cup sugar

I mixed my oils first. I used a blend of fragrance and essential oils, going for mango, peach, raspberry, strawberry, ginger, and cinnamon (I'm in love with peach and mango as a combination at the moment. My house constantly smells of it). 

Next I measured out my other ingredients. My landlord's teacups may never fully recover.

But that's okay, because you should see what we've done to the rest of the house. Next step was whipping the shea butter. As I've mentioned probably many times before here, I have nerve damage in my right arm from untreated/badly treated RSI, so hand-whipping the shea butter was really hard work! I made it easier on myself by doing the whipping on a hob set to a low temp so the butter melted a bit as I went.

This really didn't look like a lot of butter to me, so I threw in a bit more halfway through. I easily ended up with enough mixture for a big-sized jar. Anyway, once I had the butter mixed to a creamy consistency, I started to add in the grapeseed oil, blending in a bit at a time. Once that was all in, I mixed in the vitamin E, corn flour, and fragrance/essential oil blend and stirred it all together. The recipe then said to add the sugar in a bit at a time, but I was feeling frisky so I just dumped a cup in and went for it.

And that was it! This is the (slightly blurry) finished product:

Ta-da! The scent isn't quite as strong as I hoped; next time I'll probably double the quantities. But otherwise it looks and feels beautiful! The only downside was cleaning up, as shea butter just got everywhere. Everywhere. My entire kitchen is really nicely moisturised now, I suppose. 

In an effort to use more shea butter, I also made myself a couple of new lip balms: one in absinthe and caramel, one in lavender and pumpkin. The absinthe/caramel one is gorgeous! I want to eat it. I added in a drop of aniseed EO to spice up the absinthe oil and it's all tingly and awesome. And now I'm off for a bath to test my scrub!