It’s officially spring! This time of year my two favorite scents and flavors are lavender and lemon.
While I could bake and eat lavender and lemon cookies all day long, I also like looking for other ways to incorporate them into my life. One way to do that is with a lavender and lemon sugar scrub.
I like sugar scrubs because they’re a self-care treat you can enjoy every few days—or as often as you like. Sugar scrubs are a way to exfoliate, cleanse, and hydrate your skin. I like to use them because I feel refreshed afterward and I can smell it after I’ve gotten out of the shower.
When you’re making a sugar scrub, it’s important to be respectful of your skin—make sure you’re using ingredients that agree with your body. While exfoliating can smooth your skin and feel transformative, it’s also important not to irritate your skin.
Before we get into the recipe, let’s talk about some of the ingredients we’re using. Some of the information for this comes from my main go-to resource, The Hearth Witch’s Compendium: Magical and Natural Living for Every Day by Anna Franklin. The other information about oils I have learned from herbalists.
Lemon
When it comes to your body, lemon can help to soften the skin, work on diminishing wrinkles, help fade age spots, and helps to generate new cells. Once you’ve used it on your skin, make sure you rinse it off entirely.
Magically, it helps with cleansing, purification, healing, love, and protection. Lemon is ruled by the Moon and the element of Water. This means it can feel feminine, relate to intuition, and possibly feel cooling or soothing.
A little lemon juice can go a long way in a sugar scrub, so if you’re not crazy about it, use a little bit at first.
Lavender
For your body, lavender helps to tighten the skin, it includes collagen, so it can help with wrinkles and aging skin.
Magically, Lavender relates to attraction, love, joy, sleep, psychic awareness, prosperity, purification, healing, cleansing, meditation, peace, and harmony. It is ruled by the planet Mercury, which also rules communication, and its element is Air. This means it has more of masculine and yang energy.
It also relates to the deities Cernunnos, Circe, Hekate, Medea, Saturn, and serpent goddesses. If you work with any of these deities, you can incorporate lavender on this sugar scrub in your work with them, especially if you want to do some work for purification or love.
Oil
A note about oils: because we’re comprised of animal cells, we don’t always have an easy time absorbing plant-based cellular structures. This means that most plant-based oils are not easily absorbed into the skin, with the exception of jojoba oil. We actually have an easier time absorbing animal-based oils, but those don’t have a great shelf life outside of a refrigerator. That doesn’t mean other oils such as olive or coconut don’t work at all, but they may not give you a deep hydration; instead they remain on the surface of your skin.
Personally, I like using coconut oil in part because of the way it smells. Since it solidifies below a certain temperature, it mixes well as a sugar scrub and has a good shelf life.
Moon Phase
If you work with the phases of the moon, you could make and use this sugar scrub during the waning moon phase. That’s the phase in between the waxing moon and new moon, when the moon is losing its intensity. Magically speaking, this is a great time to release, cleanse, and purify.
Using a Sugar Scrub with Intention
Since this sugar scrub helps with cleansing, purification, healing, love, peace, protection, meditation, and harmony, you can use those intentions when you’re using it on your body. For example, you could imagine that in addition to dead skin and dirt, the sugar scrub is helping you get rid of other people’s feelings, judgement, and energy while you’re washing your body.
The power of intention and visualization can be pretty potent, especially when you’re taking a bath or are in the shower. Our minds don’t have much to focus on, and in those moments we can actually get some of our best ideas. But if you want to help cleanse or rinse off things you don’t want to be carrying around, you can repeat affirmations or imagine releasing other people’s energy back to them.
You can also imagine bringing peace, love, and harmony into your life. You can use affirmations about those topics as well. It’s all up to you!
Lemon & Lavender Sugar Scrub Recipe
2 cups sugar
1/2 cup coconut oil, melted
Zest of one lemon
Juice of half a lemon
1/4 cup dried lavender, ground and chopped
Combine the sugar and melted coconut oil and stir until the ingredients are thoroughly intertwined. To melt the coconut oil, I typically heat the 1/2 cup in a microwave-proof bowl in the microwave for about a minute, but you can also melt it over a stove top. If the temperature in your home is already over 78°, you probably don’t need to melt it at all.
Zest the lemon first. If you want less lemon, zest less than you think you want, combine it with the other ingredients, smell, and determine if you want to add more. Depending on the size and juiciness of your lemon, squeeze in the juice from about half a lemon and stir to combine. You can also determine later if you want to add more.
Grind the lavender either in a mortar and pestle or spice grinder, then chop to make the pieces as small and powdery as possible. This is so that the lavender disperses through the sugar scrub and doesn’t clog up your shower drain.
Once all the ingredients are thoroughly combined, smell and do a patch test (see below). This is your recipe, so you can also customize and add more lavender or lemon if you like.
I recommend storing this in a plastic storage container. That will help improve the sugar scrub’s shelf life and you won’t have to worry about glass breaking in the shower. Use as often as you like; I use it about every 3-4 days. If you shave parts of your skin, I recommend using this a day or two after shaving.
A few notes:
Feel free to change or sub out these ingredients if you know you’ll have a reaction to them. If you’re making this for someone else, it helps to know if they have any allergies or if they could have an adverse reaction to any of these ingredients.
Once you’ve made a batch, do a patch test. Use a small portion on your skin (I use the inside of my arm) to test out the scrub by scrubbing it on your skin and rinsing it off. Wait about 5-10 minutes and see if there is a reaction. If you do react, it could take longer.
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