I haven't felt this particular frisson of excitement since I wrote about a home-made body scrub I whipped up more than two years ago. :-) That sometimes we find the best beauty products in our very own kitchen is a truth my subconscious mind is well aware of, but my conscious brain does need a reminder every now and then.

You know how it is in winter: dry, flaky skin, your body itches the more you scratch it (there was absolutely no innuendo intended here), and you oftentimes wish you could just be like a snake and shed it... The cold, the absolute lack of humidity in the air, the heating: none of these are particularly beneficial to your skin. So what do you do then? Yeah, you slather your epidermis* with body lotion after you get out of the shower, except when you don't/won't, because despite the fact that you've been heating the bathroom for hours, it still feels more like a Nordic Viking's idea of hell than a proper bathroom.

* I totally ran out of options here... I mean I can't say "skin" five times in a paragraph, now can I? Even if English is more forgiving about it than Hungarian.

Finally you just get fed up, and decide to raid your kitchen in the hopes of finding some remedy to your skin's atrocious condition. You get creative and you concoct the perfect solution to your predicament.

Voilà. Binary Star Studios present Izar's Inexpensive and Invigorating Body Scrub that, despite being just a simple body scrub, will put an end to all your skin troubles at once.

• Take a (clean!) vessel of any kind. It can be a simple cup or, if you wish to make a bigger batch at a time and store the leftovers for future use, a glass jar.
  
  
• Fill your cup with sugar and add a spoonful of olive oil. Mix the two until the oil coats the the sugar thoroughly.
  
  
• Add a teaspoonful of ground coffee and a teaspoonful of cinnamon powder. Mix well with the sugar. (I used my Dad's precious Arabica blend, but what he doesn't know won't get me in trouble, right? :-D)
  
  
• Add a drop of sweet-orange essential oil or, if you're lucky like me and are in the possession of Alverde's Blood Orange and Maracuja Body Oil, then add a teaspoonful of that.
  
  
• Now take some time and mix the whole thing as thoroughly as you can. When you deem your body scrub to be ready, just march into your bathroom, take a shower and then go over your whole body with this deliciously scented scrub, then rinse.
  
  
• When you're done, marvel at your brand new skin that doesn't itch, isn't dry and flaky, smells like a confectionery and is smooth and conditioned thanks to the oils in the scrub.
  

If you don't really like the scent of coffee, you can leave it out or use less, but I really do encourage you to use it as it adds some extra, non-melting scrubby bits to the mix. Then again, because the sugar is coated in oil, it melts much-much slower than it would otherwise.

Keep in mind though that this stuff is not for the faint of heart: it does have a very intense smell and is pretty rough on your body, but it does wonders to skin that's been tortured by winter weather. You can store it in an airtight jar in your fridge, just make sure you don't contaminate it:

Don't scoop it out with your wet hands! Water will make the sugar melt, not to mention provide a great breeding ground for germs. Use a small spoon for that purpose, one you can even store in the jar if you want.

Well, that's it! Of course, you can get creative too and come up with all sorts of variations for this: you can change the base and use something more gentle, like ground almonds or walnuts, or you can add different spices to the mix, or leave everything as it is, except use less coffee and add some cocoa-powder. Just try not to use anything that has water in it: you really don't want to end up with a jarful of totally useless sugar syrup, now do you? ;-)

Good luck, and if you have your own home-made wonder-products, do share them with us!  

Me and my flat iron are great friends 95% of the time. The remaining 5% is made up of those few occasions when I am too stupid to pay attention and get various body parts of mine caught between the two ceramic plates. A few weeks ago it was my left thumb’s turn to get fried. Having finished my usual ritual of yelling profanities through a mouth full of said left thumb, I immediately started rummaging through my stash in search of some magic potion that would restore my poor limb to an acceptable state. I soon came up with three things:

1. a home-made replica of Skinceuticals’ B5 gel
2. a bottle of aloe vera gel, enriched with some more panthenol, hyaluronic acid and extracts of various herbs
3. and finally, a sample of Uriage’s Cu-Zn Cream

I sat down to my desk, applied these three things in the respective order, and what followed was nothing short of a miracle.

I first put a drop of the home-made B5 gel onto the burnt skin and let it settle a bit. After it got absorbed a little, I sprayed on the aloe vera gel to give the hyaluronic acid some moisture to work with and to further aid the healing process. I kept blowing air onto the damaged area as well to cool it a bit and lessen the pain, but of course the calming effect was only temporary: the minute I stopped, the pain came back.

As a last step I dabbed on a smidgen of the Cu-Zn Cream and the miracle began: my thumb ceased throbbing and burning the second I applied the cream and the pain never came back. After this pleasant little surprise I put a band-aid on my finger and went about doing my business for the day. When I got back home about 6 or 7 hours later it was time to do the washing up, pack in and head for our summer cottage. I tried to do the washing up with the bandaid on, but it soon fell off and to my greatest surprise the deep red, irritated skin I had had in the morning was entirely a thing of the past by then. My thumb was as good as new, with only the skin still feeling a bit tight, but that too went away remarkably quickly. By the time I arrived to our cottage, my parents couldn’t tell which thumb I had burnt in the morning, and to be quite honest, if (by some weird accident) I had suffered a partial memory loss and had forgotten everything that happened to me that day, I couldn’t have either.

Oh boy… Look how much I babbled when I could have just said instead: “Wow girls, take a look at this weird blue stuff! It made my burn go away in less than half a day!!!” But then I do strive to be a little more convincing than that.



On another occasion my encounter with a particularly nasty bug left me with a similarly nasty swell on my neck, which looked not unlike a raspberry with an insect bite in the middle. That was in the morning, and applying the same treatment (sans the aloe very spray) had left me with the same spectacular results by mid-afternoon. There was only a slight rosy tint left, a faint reminder of the angry thing that it was just half a day before.

A friend of mine whom I actually got this cream from uses it as a night treatment when she feels her skin is in need of some serious calming and soothing action. She reported that in the morning she wakes up with skin that is firmer and more uniform, as if it had been given its own weekend getaway to a spa.

I haven’t had this cream for very long yet, but it has already helped me out on several occasions, which made it well worth a blog entry and a strong recommendation.

Uriage Cu-Zn cream is a copper-zinc emulsion made for “atopic skin and skin prone to irritation, requiring a protective, soothing and disinfectant effect”. It is hypoallergenic, free of fragrance and preservatives, and comes in 75 ml metal tube.

Above mentioned friend of mine got me the full size product from Romania (naturally, the brand Uriage is not present on the Hungarian market...) and it cost me 2100 HUF, which is the rough equivalent of 11.18 USD or 7.8 EUR, but I have seen it being sold for more than 30 USD on online stores, which in my opinion is simply ridiculous.

Izar © 2009