SCK Tries… Homemade Lemon Sugar Scrub

This time around on SCK Tries, I’ll be making homemade lemon sugar scrub based on a recipe from the book, A Summer Treasury, that I reviewed recently.

The Original DIY

This is my third time trying out a recipe from the Little Country Cottage book series, as I’ve made Easter egg chicks and strawberry jam before. I was fairly confident in following the recipe as I didn’t have a lot of trouble in my previous attempts. All of them were fairly straightforward with what I needed to have and do, though I’d done some tweaking due to personal preferences.

---

Ingredients & Equipment

For this recipe, you’ll need granulated sugar, olive oil, lemon juice, and a jar or container with a lid to hold your scrub. I did a quick Google search and found that granulated sugar is also known as “refined sugar,” so I knew I could still use the pack I had.

Labels, twine, and colored markers are your nice-to-haves if you’d like to make your jar or container more personalized and kawaii.

To note, I did not follow the exact measurements in the recipe and used much smaller quantities to fit my sample-sized jar. I weighed the jar first and then tailored my measurements from there.

---

Process

Following the instructions, I combined the ingredients into a bowl. When I saw the minuscule amount of oil, I already had some doubts… but I went ahead and continued to mix everything. This is what it looked like afterward:

It looked quite clumpy, so by now, I knew something was off. I took another look at the recipe to see if the result would be anything similar, but the second step mentioned that you had to continue mixing until you formed a “thick, grainy paste.” Mine was grainy alright, but there was barely enough liquid to make it a thick paste! I knew I had to wing it to get the right consistency, so I continued to add a little bit more olive oil in between mixes until I felt that there was enough. It eventually ended up looking like this:

The mixture ended up looking closer to what I knew sugar scrubs actually looked like, so I felt that this was already good to go. I went ahead and scooped everything into the jar, and off I went to the kitchen sink to try it out.

---

The End Result

I wet my hands, got a small amount of the scrub, and rubbed it all over my hands. I then rinsed everything with soap and water following the instructions. I also did a comparison between washing with just soap vs. using a scrub beforehand, and I did notice that my hands felt much smoother with the latter.

But to be honest, I’m not too sure how I feel about this recipe! Which is kind of a bummer, because I really enjoyed making the Easter egg chicks and strawberry jam. Maybe there was something off with the measurements I made initially. I haven’t tried recreating the recipe using the full ingredient quantities, so I’m not sure if I would’ve ended up doing the same thing (i.e. adding more olive oil) if I had.

I also wasn’t a big fan of the olive oil smell. I know it’d be covered up by the fragrance of the hand soap, and that this is a natural take on the manufactured, artificially-scented scrubs I’m more used to. But I thought it would be nice if I could add essential oils to somehow mask the smell. There wasn’t anything mentioned in the recipe though, and as I didn’t want to take any more risks with experimenting at that time, I left it as it is.

That said, I’ll still be using the scrub as I don’t want to let it go to waste! I also did a quick search a while after I made the scrub, and found that there were other takes on the lemon sugar scrub, such as using coconut oil instead of olive oil and adding lemon zest. Some have also suggested adding essential oils to the scrub for fragrance, so I might give it a shot and add a few drops of lavender essential oil to see if that makes me like it a bit more!

You can get A Summer Treasury along with other books in the Little Country Cottage/Little Homesteader series from Amazon (UK/US) and Bookshop (UK/US).