This one is one of my favorite products – a nice and gentle DIY gel scrub that turns on your wet skin into cleansing milk and leaves it all smooth and silky! It is relatively easy to make at home, it is enjoyable to use, and it makes a great gift as well!

SELF-EMULSIFYING DIY GEL SCRUB

There are thousands of scrub recipes on the internet, but most are pretty basic (mix some sugar with oil et voilá!). This DIY gel scrub goes far beyond just an exfoliation: it combines a gentle and all-natural gel-to-milk cleanser and a scrub. Yes, it is a 2-in-1 product!

First, we make an oily gel with a particular emulsifier – Sucragel AOF. It creates thick, rich gels for vegetable oil-based cosmetic formulations, such as transparent gel-to-milk products, and makes an excellent base for self-emulsifying scrubs or cleansers. It is sugar-derived, 100% biodegradable, and safe for your skin and our planet! You can find it on different sites in UK, France and US.

The basic recipe is simple, but you can go creative with it and create hundreds of different products (try different aromas, colors, and exfoliators – there are hundreds of options!)

STRAWBERRY SELF-EMULSIFYING DIY GEL SCRUB

For this scrub, I have chosen a gentle and 100% natural exfoliating agent – strawberry seeds. I added a bit of red mineral mica to look more fruity. Still, I don’t like the strawberry aroma (weird, right?)… so I have added some geranium and ylang-ylang essential oils to get the pleasant floral scent. But if you want to be consistent, choose natural strawberry perfume – in this case, your scrub will look and smell like a strawberry jam 🙂

You can choose different vegetable oils to make this product – sweet almond oil, apricot kernel oil, etc.. Still, I have taken a fractionated coconut oil (an MCT oil or caprylic/capric triglycerides) – it is a very lightweight, non-greasy, and very stable oil (your scrub will wash off easier and have a longer shelf-life). A very good choice when you make a wash-off product (like this oil cleanser, for example).

I have also added an oil-soluble preservative – the product itself does not need to be preserved as it does not contain water, but it is exposed to water. If some water drops get inside the product, it will contaminate it, so we need to provide our product with protection.

Now, the recipe for strawberry gel scrub:

• 62 g of MCT oil (caprylic/capric triglycerides)
• 30 g of Sucragel AOF
• 5 g of Jojoba oil
• 0.6 g of perfume (for example – Strawberry perfume) or essential oils
• 1 g of Spectrastat G2-N (it is an oil-soluble preservative – you can also use Optiphen or Lexgard® Natural MB)
• 0,1 g of 98% tocopherols (Vitamine E)
• a pinch (0,05 g approx) of the red mineral mica

The process of making this DIY gel scrub is a little bit tricky, but I have shown it step-by-step in my video tutorial: