This soft, silky powder transforms into a creamy, sudsy cleanser when you work it up with a bit of warm water between your palms. It stars soft and velvety kaolin clay and skin-polishing himalayan salts , and you can blend up a batch in just a few moments from just six ingredients. You can customize the exfoliation level and easily make it nut free if you want to. Let’s get started!
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The bulk of this cleanser is soft and creamy white kaolin clay. I chose white kaolin clay not only because it’s inexpensive and readily available, but also because it doesn’t make for a messy use experience. It’s rather tempting to use an exciting, colourful clay, like French red clay, but if you use a high concentration of a colourful clay in products like this you’ll find it leaves colourful splatters all over your sink whenever you use the product which… isn’t ideal. So, if you want to use a different clay I’d recommend choosing something with a fairly subdued colour (in the past I’ve used around 10% colourful clay and used white kaolin for the rest, and that has worked well, resulting in a colourful product that’s not super messy). I’d also recommend sticking to a soft clay like kaolin, zeolite, or the French clays
Salty goodness represents 20% of the formulation, Everything is ground up in your coffee grinder so those Rocky Crystal Salts are greatly tempered, but they are still a bit scrubby. To boost the exfoliation power i have added some papain enzymes at 5% (as written) this is a very gently physically exfoliating facial cleansing foam
I’ve chosen Sodium Cocoyl Isethionate (SCI) as our sole surfactant because it’s gentle and just generally lovely. It’s also naturally acidic, which makes it really easy to formulate skin-pH-friendly cleansers with it 😄 Hooray!
Almond oil weighs down the cleanser so it doesn’t float around and isn’t easily inhaled. When blended in with all the powders it vanishes, adding richness and weight to the product, but you’d probably never guess it was there. I’ve also included some vitamin E to delay rancidity. If you wanted to add a bit of an essential oil or fragrance oil you’d add it with the liquid oils.
SALT AND CLAY FOAMING FACIAL SCRUB
17.85g | 59.5% white kaolin clay 4.5g | 20% Pink Himalayan Salt
1.5g | 5% Papain Enzymes
4.5g | 15% Sodium Cocoyl Isethionate (SCI)
1.5g | 5% sweet almond oil
0.15g | 0.5% Vitamin E MT-50
Put on your dust mask.
Weigh the powdered ingredients into a small bowl. Scatter the liquid ingredients over the surface of the powders, gently aggitating the mixture to coat the drops of oil in a fine coating of powder.
Dump the mixture into your DIY-only coffee grinder and blend thoroughly. You’ll want to smack the lid of the grinder with the back of a spoon to knock powders down from the inside of the lid. You’ll also want to take the lid off at least once and stir around, taking care to turn over everything at the bottom of the grinder to ensure all the ingredients are blending together well.
Once the mixture is uniform, all that’s left is packaging up the cleanser.
To use: dispense about 1/4–1/2 tsp of the powder cleanser into your palm. Add a bit of water and work it up into a lather; from there, use it as you’d use any foaming facial cleanser. Enjoy!
SHELF LIFE & STORAGE
Because this product does not contain any water, it does not require a broad-spectrum preservative (broad spectrum preservatives ward off microbial growth, and microbes require water to live—no water, no microbes!). Kept reasonably cool and dry, it should last at least a year before any of the oils go rancid. If you notice it starts to smell like old nuts or crayons, that’s a sign that the oils have begun to oxidize; chuck it out and make a fresh batch if that happens.
SUBSTITUTIONS
As always, be aware that making substitutions will change the final product. While these swaps won’t break the recipe, you will get a different final product than I did.
As I’ve provided this recipe in percentages as well as grams you can easily calculate it to any size using a simple spreadsheet as I’ve explained in this post. As written in grams this recipe will make 30g, which will fill a 2 fl oz/60g container nicely.
To learn more about the ingredients used in this formulation, including why they’re included and what you can substitute them with, Encyclopedia. It doesn’t have everything in it yet, but there’s lots of good information there! If I have not given a specific substitution suggestion in this list please look up the ingredient in the encyclopedia before asking.
Please read the blog post for information on using a different clay.
Your Sodium Cocoyl Isethionate (SCI) can be any format—sticks/needles, finely powdered, or chunky powder. After the coffee grinder it’ll be a fine powder no matter how it started.
Sodium Lauryl Sulfoacetate (SLSa) would be my first choice for an alternative. Whatever you use, it MUST be dry—no liquid surfactants here!
You can substitute another lightweight oil like apricot kernel oil, grapeseed oil, or sunflower seed oil instead of the sweet almond oil.
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