Sugar and salt are naturally occurring exfoliants. Consider peppermint scented salt scrubs for tough knees and elbows. And more gentle sugar scrubs to soothe chapped lips.
When choosing which handmade bath salts and scrubs to purchase, look for dead sea salt and epsom salt as ingredients. Dead sea salt should be cosmetic grade. And products that include it typically costs a bit more than those using less expensive salts. It is only ten percent sodium chloride (table salt), and the rest of its composition is minerals.
Epsom salt is made up of magnesium sulfate. It is reputed to pull soreness from the skin. It is also used as a laxative. So if you decide to use a salt scrub on your chapped lips, make sure you don’t ingest too much.
Rock salt and kosher salt are sodium chloride. It is very drying to the skin. And high quality salt scrubs should never list sodium chloride as a first ingredient. (It is a percentage of the composition of other salts, so it is often listed as an ingredient on thoroughly labeled scrubs.)
Sugar and salt scrubs can be blended with any number of natural ingredients to soften their texture, or provide fragrance. Shea butter and glycerin are common ingredients. It is my preference to look for botanical fragrances. But a great many sugar scrubs are scented and named with food in mind such as cookie scrub.
Kat at Sudstress, makes a fresh smelling Peppermint Rosemary Sugar Scrub. I really like to use it on chapped lips and hands. My family also tried her Mint Meditation Natural Soap and After Hours Man Soap, which look wonderfully artistic. And they are a nice fragrance change from the beer soap we recently sampled.
We had two mishaps with the sugar scrub. First, I spilled it on the carpet. It is a crumbly consistency. And little sugar granules went everywhere. I vacuumed them up. Which left a nice peppermint smell in the air and the vacuum.
Then my four year old decided it smelled like dessert and grabbed a bite of it. She is alive and well. Though I do not recommend eating bath products.
