How to Make a Salt and Shea Butter Body Scrub

A body scrub is the one piece of skincare where making it yourself is no compromise at all. Three ingredients, one bowl, and nothing in it that needs a laboratory.

It is also very hard to get wrong. Too oily? More salt. Too salty? A little more Shea butter. A bit soft, a bit stiff: all of it still works on your skin. This is a scrub, not a soufflé.

Two projects, one blender

The immersion blender is there for the Shea butter, never the salt. It needs a good amount of butter in the bowl to whip anything, while a scrub for your own bath or sauna needs just a spoonful. So make two things at once: whip a full batch of Shea butter, fill a jar for your body, and keep one spoon back for the scrub. Unless, of course, you are making a bigger batch for friends or as gifts.

Here is our whipped Shea butter recipe. Start there, then come back for the salt.

What you need

• Salt. Fine, coarse, pink, grey or red: any salt works.
• Baobab oil. Olive oil from the kitchen will do the job, and we will try very hard not to take it personally. Baobab sinks in faster, though, and your skin will notice.
• One spoon of whipped Shea butter.
• A bowl, a fork and a jar with a lid. A mortar too, if your salt is on the chunky side.

The salt we used this time

Salt'sUp is a salt shop with over sixty salts and peppers on the shelf. Salt from the Kalahari, from Guérande, from the Himalayas, from the Dead Sea, from Hawaii: one shelf for the table and for the body, and any of them works in this recipe. It is a lovely shop to fall into.

This time we picked Alaea coarse salt from Hawaii. The color got us first, a warm autumn rust. Then we read its story and fell in love. It is 96 percent sea salt and 4 percent alaea, a red volcanic clay, evaporated by the sun from the Pacific on the island of Molokai, and Hawaiians have used it for centuries in ceremonies to cleanse and bless tools, canoes and homes. It also grinds down beautifully in the mortar.

It also solves a lot of presents. Almost nobody buys good salt for themselves, and a jar of it fits a housewarming, a Christmas, or the person who already has everything.

How much

The way we make it, nothing gets weighed. The oil is roughly 20 to 30 percent of the salt. The Shea butter stays at 10 percent of the salt or less, because more than that turns the scrub greasy. Too dry? More oil. Your hand tells you when it is right.

How to make it

1. Check your salt. Fine salt goes straight into the bowl. If it is chunky, give it a minute in a mortar until it feels right on your skin.
2. Add the oil a little at a time, mixing with a fork until every crystal is coated.
3. Add one spoon of whipped Shea butter and work it through with the fork. A fork keeps the crystals whole.
4. Spoon it into a dry jar. Press it down and put the lid on.

Add a few drops of essential oil at the end if you want it scented.

Why salt holds up

Salt dissolves in water and stays whole in fat. Mixed into oil and Shea butter, the crystals stay sharp right up to the moment they meet water on your skin. That is why the scrub keeps its grit in the jar for months.

A crystal always has corners. The size of the grain decides how much it scratches at once. Coarse salt rolls around and works in patches. Fine salt covers evenly and does the same work with less force. Finer for the body, coarser for heels.

Salt is not gentle. That is the whole point of it.

In the shower or sauna

You know how a scrub works. The surprise comes afterwards: the salt rinses away, the Shea butter and oil stay, and your skin comes out soft and moisturized. You can probably skip the lotion.

One warning, though. Get greedy with it and the shower floor gets slippery.

How often? Once or twice a week is plenty. Keep it off your face, off freshly shaved skin, and off anything sore or sunburnt.

Two variations, same bowl

• Foot scrub. Skip the mortar, keep the salt coarse and use a little less oil. Follow it with plain Shea butter and a pair of socks overnight.
• Bath soak. Two spoons under running water. The salt dissolves, the Shea butter does not, and it will leave a ring on the tub. Worth it, and now you know.

Three small things worth knowing

• Keep water out of the jar. There is no water in the recipe, so wet fingers are the only thing that will spoil it. A small dry spoon solves it for good.
• Not the bathroom windowsill. Heat and light are the two things Shea butter dislikes. A cupboard keeps it happy.
• It keeps for a long time. After about two years, it can slowly start losing some of its skin-loving benefits, but that does not mean it has gone bad. It does not spoil the way food does, and it will still moisturize your skin for years.

Where to keep it

Any clean jar with a lid works, and a screw-top jam jar has held more homemade scrub than every container ever sold for the purpose. Make as much as you like and keep it in whatever you already own.

Two things worth knowing before you pick one. Glass and a tiled shower floor have an argument coming, and the tiles always win. Plastic survives that, and it is the one material in your bathroom with no good ending, because it comes back as something worse every time it is recycled.

Metal is the quiet winner. It recycles endlessly with no loss, it does not shatter, and it keeps light out. Any tin will do. Ours is an empty metal tin 115 g | 4 oz, and it comes empty on purpose. It is an option, not part of the recipe, and the pouch works perfectly well on its own.

Why raw Shea butter for this

Refining strips Shea butter down to something pale and odorless, and takes most of what makes it worth using along with it. Raw, unrefined Shea butter is rich in oleic and stearic fatty acids and naturally contains vitamins A and E. It smells faintly nutty and smoky, because it was made over a wood fire by the women in our cooperative in Northern Ghana, and that smell is the receipt.

Baobab oil works from the other direction: cold-pressed, high in omega-6 and omega-9 fatty acids with some omega-3, natural tocopherols, and light enough to sink in fast.

If you make things at home, buy the oil in a size that survives it. The Shea butter 450 g | 16 oz and Baobab oil 210 ml | 7.1 fl oz set is the pair we reach for, and the bigger bottle costs far less per milliliter than a small one, which matters once you start using the oil for everything else too.

Buying in the United States? Everything is on our Amazon store. Anywhere else, start with our Raw Shea Butter and Cold-Pressed Baobab Oil.