After using our coffee cozy and cup cover, try coffee-based skincare
CoffeeMan1 has drunk many cups of coffee over the years after brewing in his trusty french press or Black and Decker—yes, just like the power tools—coffee maker. He grinds his Arabica beans in an electric burr grinder and uses our french press cover or tea cozy to keep his coffee hot as long as possible in the french press or coffee-maker carafe.
Because he doesn’t garden, though, he has never saved the grounds for fertilizer. So he was intrigued recently with a different way to keep them from going straight to the trash.
Would you believe rub the grounds on your skin?
That’s right, you can make coffee grounds part of your skincare routine. A coffee scrub offers several skin benefits:
- Exfoliates without chemicals to improve circulation and skin texture.
- Reduces cellulite, thus giving your skin a firmer appearance for up to three hours. More accurately, it irritates the skin, which brings water in to swell the cells and make them firmer.
- Gets rid of puffy eyes because it works as a constrictor to reduce swelling and inflammation.
But make them a little less harsh with olive or almond oil
As Dana Oliver points out at Style.com, quoting dermatologist Dr. Amy Wechsler, M.D., “Scrubs shouldn’t hurt. You can grind the coffee beans so that it becomes a manual exfoliant and not a sharp one.” To smooth the grind further and ease application, most beauty consultants recommend mixing the grounds with an oil."
For example, here’s a recipe from certified nutritional consultants and health coaches Marra St. Clair and Lori Kenyon-Farley (The Juice Cleanse Reset Diet)—also shared in Ms. Oliver’s article:
What you’ll need: 1 cup of warm coffee grounds, 1/2 cup of sea salt, and 2 tablespoons olive oil.
Directions:
- Lay newspapers (or an old towel) down on your bathroom floor.
- Stir all ingredients together and apply the mixture to dry skin.
- Brush thoroughly onto skin, giving extra attention to your elbows, feet, and other extra dry areas. Leave on for about two minutes.
- Brush off as much of the mixture as possible before hopping in the shower.
- Alternatively, you can apply and wash off in the shower, but cover the drain with mesh to avoid clogging the drain.
If you prefer ready-made, try a coffee-based cozy skincare line
In an article published last year at http://gear.lifehacker.com/1785908908, Jillian Lucas highlights one of these skincare lines: Frank Body, an Australia-based supplier who offers a coffee scrub at $17. It contains roasted and ground robusta coffee beans, cold pressed sweet almond oil, vitamin E, sea salt, brown sugar, and a few other ingredients that help slough off dead skin.
Jillian testifies to the silky-smooth results of “the Original,” which has become famous on Instagram, but it also comes in Coconut, Peppermint, and Cacao versions—each adding unique ingredients to those ground robusta coffee beans. She suggests using it in the shower when you’re already wet and then rinsing your shower or tub thoroughly afterward.
Chiara Gabardi nicely summarizes a number of other coffee-based skin and hair care products, pointing out that coffee can give hair a deeper tone and better sheen. Her article is at http://eluxemagazine.com/beauty/perk-up-your-beauty-routine-10-coffee-based-beauty-products/.