20 pledges for 2020: How to make your own natural face scrub during lockdown

Truly ethical and sustainable beauty brands aren't easy to find. Can Jessica Jones go a whole year without using anything else?

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With all this free time spent at home in quarantine, I’ve been looking for completely natural ways to recreate some of my favourite products. I love using face exfoliators and there are some great 100 per cent natural and sustainable ones out there on the market.

Boots’ own Botanics range includes vegan face scrubs for men and women and Sukin also offers several different completely natural, cruelty free and even carbon-neutral facial scrubs. Bulldog has a sustainable and ethical face scrub for men, with fully recyclable packaging made from sugarcane plastic.

There are many other options too but you can get just as good, if not better, results using simple homemade recipes with ingredients you probably already have.

If like me you drink copious amounts of coffee in the morning, you might also be throwing away all your old coffee grounds. Amongst the many environmental and ethical problems of coffee, - deforestation, water wastage and child labour to name a few, - spent coffee grounds often end up filling landfill sites and emitting methane, the greenhouse gas that contributes to a lot of global warming.

With the world’s coffee obsession unlikely to diminish anytime soon, some companies like Bio-Bean and The Coffee Recycling Company are trying to help the situation by collecting coffee grounds and finding alternative ways to reuse them. But there are ways you can also recycle your morning coffee to make it go further than just a caffeine boost.

Caffeine is full of antioxidants and is great for increasing blood flow and promoting cell turnover. For a simple body scrub, I just left the coffee grounds to dry out overnight and then stored them in a glass jar. This could also be used as a scalp exfoliant to remove product build-up from hair and restore its shine before washing out with shampoo.

For a face scrub I wanted to make the coffee grounds a bit less harsh so I mixed in some melted coconut oil, soft brown sugar and a dash of vanilla essence. I didn’t use any measurements because you can make it to the texture you like. This face scrub is invigorating and brightening whilst the coconut oil moisturises the skin.

After searching online for some more ideas, I found other possible combos for face scrubs such as ground oatmeal and honey, olive oil and sugar, and lemon and sugar. So if you have a spare 10 minutes (and, let's face it, chances are you do), why not try making your own completely natural and sustainable face exfoliant instead of buying a new one?