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How to Make a DIY Coffee Scrub (Fast & Affordable Recipe)

coffee scrub

If you love coffee as much as we do, you’re probably always looking for ways to get more coffee into your life. Luckily for you, a coffee scrub is a novel way to use your favorite bean to keep your skin happy and healthy. Ground coffee has the perfect texture and hardness to use in an exfoliating body scrub; it is not hard enough to irritate your skin but also isn’t so soft that it’s ineffective. In this article, we’ll teach you how to make coffee scrub and how to use it.

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The benefits of exfoliation

Your skin is your body’s largest organ, and if you want to keep it functioning normally, you have to take care of it. Exfoliation removes dead skin cells using a lightly abrasive scrub – sometimes called an exfoliant. Your skin naturally sheds skin monthly, but sometimes dead skin cells don’t fall off on their own and need to be removed with some help.

coffee scrub exfoliating
Image credit: meesookde, Shutterstock

If you neglect your skin and don’t perform regular exfoliation, your skin can become dry and flaky, and your pores can clog, leading to nasty pimples and ingrown hairs. Many companies sell expensive exfoliating products that don’t work much better than a simple, homemade scrub. Let’s learn how to make one with ground coffee.

Coffee scrubs use ground coffee as the exfoliating agent. Caffeine is good for your skin, but the primary effect we’re after is the abrasive scrubbing that comes from having coffee particles suspended in the scrub. The caffeine content of coffee is a boost, but so is the aroma. A scrub based on coffee works great and smells just as good.

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How to Make Coffee Scrub:

Ingredients
  • About ½ cup of ground coffee
  • ½ cup brown sugar
  • ½ cup coconut oil
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Equipment
  • Bowl
  • Spoon
  • Microwave or stovetop
  • Stove-safe pan (optional)

1. Mix the sugar and coffee.

Combine the brown sugar and ground coffee. Aim for an even mix. You can usually tell when they’re well mixed by the color. Any unevenness in the color indicates clumpiness, and that you should mix it a bit more.

2. Melt the coconut oil.

Place the coconut oil in a bowl and microwave it for about 30 seconds. You can also heat it in a pan on the stove.

3. Add the vanilla.

Mix the melted coconut oil and vanilla extract.

4. Combine all ingredients.

Combine the wet and dry ingredients until you have a smooth, clump-free mixture.

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Helpful Tips & Tricks

Frequency

Use your coffee scrub to exfoliate your skin one or two times per week. That’s often enough to keep your skin healthy; you don’t want to overdo it. If you exfoliate every day, you can irritate your skin and do more harm than good.

Coffee

It doesn’t matter what kind of coffee you use, but try to use a fine grind size if you can. Coarse ground coffee has sharp edges that will scratch and bother your skin. You want to avoid French press-sized grounds and use coffee ground for automatic drip machines or finer – like espresso grind sizes.

We use old forgotten coffee to make our coffee scrubs since we don’t want to waste fresh coffee on something that we won’t get to taste.

how to make coffee scrub
Image credit: PandaStudio, Shutterstock

Alternative Ingredients

You can substitute other ingredients if you’d prefer a scent other than vanilla. We like to use lemon extract and orange extract – together and individually – to make a bright, citrusy scrub. You can substitute ordinary sugar for the brown sugar if you don’t like how the citrusy aroma mixes with it. Lemon and orange extract give the scrub a completely different character that is a good change of pace after you’ve used up the vanilla.

You can be creative with what ingredients you use in your scrub. As long as you use finely ground coffee, there are no other rigid rules to follow. Swapping extracts is an easy and fun way to experiment with different scents.

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Homemade Coffee Scrub: Conclusion

Coffee scrubs are great smelling and effective exfoliators that are easy to make with common household ingredients. It takes less than ten minutes to whip up a batch, and you’ll save a ton of money compared to buying a premade scrub from the store. As an added benefit, you can also customize your scrub to have any scent you want. Experimenting with ingredients and creating new blends is fun and easy.

It’s important to exfoliate regularly, but don’t overdo it. Too much exfoliation can be as bad or even worse than not exfoliating at all. It can be tempting to use every day since it smells so nice, but try to limit yourself to one or two days a week.


Featured Image: Julia Sudnitskaya, Shutterstock

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Kate MacDonnell

Kate is a lifelong coffee enthusiast and homebrewer who enjoys writing for coffee websites and sampling every kind of coffee known to man. She’s tried unusual coffees from all over the world and owns an unhealthy amount of coffee gear.

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