Pin Testing - DIY Salt and Sugar Scrubs

Joe's sister-in-law is having a baby girl this summer and Joe's mom, sister, and I are helping her family throw a baby shower later this month in Detroit. My task is to help make goodies for prizes during the shower games, and luckily I have lots of DIY gift ideas pinned on Pinterest, so I decided to try some! First up, Paula Deen's citrus salt scrub - original recipe can be found on her site here. 

You'll need:

1/2 cup sea salt
1/2 cup oil of choice (I used sunflower because it doesn't have a strong scent)
1/2 teaspoon lemon zest
1/2 teaspoon orange zest
container

I ordered several supplies for my DIY gift venture from Majestic Mountain Sage after seeing lots of other bloggers suggest it. It's GREAT! Check it out here. They have all sorts of goodies for making lotions, lip balms, scrubs, etc and they have some great containers too. I ordered some size 89 low profile 8 oz jars and lids for the scrub. Lids come in black and white, and the mouth of the jar measures 3.5 inches across. I put a battery next to one of the containers for size reference - I always wish sites would provide measurements on jars/containers because they always end up smaller in real life than they look in pictures!

I actually already made three jars full of this scrub the other day, but I ran out of sea salt so I had to get more to fill the remaining jars. It took a full container of sea salt from Walmart to fill three jars. The first go around I had coarse sea salt, but they didn't have any when I went back so I went with fine sea salt instead. After seeing both, I think the course salt has a better "scrub" texture if there is such a thing :-) 

I doubled the recipe for this go around, which was enough to fill one jar with a little left over for the next. First, I dumped 1 cup of sea salt into a large mixing bowl and then added the orange and lemon zest.

The recipe calls for equal amounts salt and oil, but I felt there was too much oil in this ratio. For the doubled recipe, I started with adding 1/2 cup of oil and then adding a little at a time until I achieved the consistency I wanted. Here's how mine looked when I got the amount of oil I was looking for:

Then just scoop into the jar and enjoy! This comes out a beautiful rich yellow and smells absolutely fabulous!

Here's a picture showing the visual difference between the fine and coarse salt (coarse salt is on the right).

I haven't tried using the scrub yet, but it smells great and is really easy to make. I got all of the ingredients at Walmart and making the scrub takes less than five minutes. Love those easy projects!

I also made a vanilla brown sugar body scrub from another recipe found on Pinterest. The original recipe is located here. This was equally easy and also smells fantastic! Here's a picture of the end result:

All in all, I'm very happy with the way these turned out! Tomorrow I should be getting the remaining supplies I need to make a mocha frappuccino face mask to add to the prize gift bags, and I hope it turns out as well as the scrubs did!