Homemade Body Scrub with Sunflower Oil, Oatmeal, and Brown Sugar for Luminous Winter Skin

I’ve often thought that if there is ONE natural beauty product everyone can make, and no one should pay cash money for, it’s a body scrub. Particularly, when it’s one like this one – made of brown sugar, sunflower oil, oatmeal, and cinnamon, all (typically) standard kitchen fare.

Homemade scrubs are easy and so much cheaper than what you’d purchase at the store. And what’s more, you’re saving plastic packaging, and you can customize the scrub based on whatever you have on hand. And best of all, it takes basically less then three minutes to put this type of thing together.

Taking care of winter skin

Winter is here and that means trying to figure out how to best manage winter skin. The thermometer climbs up and down (but mostly down) and perhaps your skin is starting to feel like it is a piece of dehydrated coconut (i.e. dried out, rough, tight). Exfoliation is often quite nice for body skin, but in the winter the thought of rubbing your skin down with a vigorous scrub might seem as good an idea as walking across jagged glass – that is to say, painful and to be avoided. Winter skin can’t take what summer skin can.

Use gentle ingredients

This brown sugar oatmeal scrub is more gentle. It exfoliates like a champ, but brown sugar is slightly less granular and more paste-like than say, a sea salt scrub, which makes it a bit nicer for dry, irritated, or sensitive winter skin. The oatmeal provides some additional skin-supporting and exfoliatory benefits (yes, I know exfoliatory is not a word) but is also soothing and gentle.

Pick your oil (and use the leftover as a body moisturizer)

I used sunflower oil in the recipes, but truthfully, you could substitute a host of other oils here, depending on what you have in your pantry/bathroom, or what you want to use for your specific skin.

And don’t forget that oil has a double purpose – in addition to making a base for your scrub, it can also be an amazing and powerful moisturizer for winter skin. Using an oil on your body skin after a shower or before bed can be a real game changer in how soft, smooth, and resilient your skin feels in the winter.

There are a host of oil options:

sunflower oil
olive oil
jojoba oil
coconut oil (just might need to give this time in the shower to soften, as coconut oil hardens at room temperature)
avocado oil
safflower oil
grapeseed oil

I recommend organic, of course, as that’s always the best option for anything you’ll be putting on your body (especially if you’re using it as a moisturizer too) but if you have an oil you want to use up in the pantry, consider using it for this scrub.

And there you have it! Stir this scrub together and smooth it into your skin during your next shower. You’ll skin will enjoy the moisturizing boost, as well as the gentle exfoliation, and you’ll glow your way through winter.

And if you’re lookiing for a few other ways to glow, consider a raw honey mask for the skin on your face, or maybe some nutrient-dense cashew and goji berry superfood bites for glowing skin, or get back to basics by nourishing your microbiome, the foundation of healthy, happy skin.

And if you’re interesting in seeing other types of scrubs, check out these: