Humble Sugar and Modest Salt - For our skin (Part 1)

Modest Salt

As we all know, eating too much sugar and salt is bad for our health. But the humble salt and sugar plays an important role in removing the dead skin on our body accumulated over time when used as a skin scrub .It also helps to smoothen the  dry and hard skin on our elbow and knees. 

Dry skin is a year-round problem. The solution? A body scrub that sloughs off flakes and leaves skin hydrated. 

Humble sugar

When you are buying a body/ facial scrub sold commercially, make sure that it has got natural/ herbal ingredients which do not damage our skin and our environment. Some  of the scrubs available in the market contains harmful chemicals and skin- harming ingredients. I had a look at one of the sugar scrub sold in a shop and was shocked to find that the first ingredient on the ingredient list was POLYTHELENE. You don't need to be a scientist to know what Polythelene is. I straight away knew that it is a form of plastic. So the best selling scrubs use polythelene as one of their ingreidents? Can you imagine polythelene going into our skin, into the drains and washed into the ocean only to be eaten by aquatic living beings? 

Please read this write-up by a consumer on "microbead" facial scrub. I bet she had a similar experience to mine when she was looking for a scrub.
http://tinychoices.com/2008/05/06/microbead-facial-scrubs/
That is the reason why I am careful in reading the ingredient list on cosmetic products, tooth pastes, soaps,cleaning liquids etc, even though it may be a popular brand or a best selling cosmetic. I don't go by brands. 

I buy a product on the basis of the Ingredients list! Please read the ingredients list and think before you buy a cosmetic/ skin products for yourself or for your friends and family as a gift.

Now, back to Sugar and Salt scrub:
It is best to use fine grains of sugar and salt in the scrub to have a gentle exfoliating action to avoid micro abrasion of the skin.
Best fine grain sugar comes in the form of cane sugar and white sugar and caster sugar.There are other other exotic sugar that can be found in organic stores like Coconut sugar (It is expensive though).  If you dont have fine sugar, powder the sugar in the food processor to attain the desired fine grain consistency. Similarly good salt that can be used for exfoliating our skin are sea salt, epsom salt or pinkish himalayan salt which are fine and contains good trace minerals. I strongly discourage you to use store bought table salt to be used as scrub as it is mainy sodium chloride and lacks all the good trace minerals which is completely removed at the time of processing the salt.

Sugar and salt scrubs are easy to make at home with the available ingredients in our kitchen pantry.  Please follow my next post on recipes ( A simple as well as an exotic skin pampering recipe) for home made salt and sugar scrub.
Until then. Bye from PetalDew- From Nature with Love.