Scrubs
Sugar and salt body scrubs — the three-step flow, the oil-to-exfoliant ratio, and the one choice (emulsified or not) that decides whether the jar needs a preservative.
A scrub is an exfoliant suspended in oil. There's no lye and no cure, but there is one choice that changes what the recipe needs of you — whether it's emulsified or not.
Three steps
The scrub flow is flat at every experience level:
- Base — how much you're making, the emulsified toggle, and your carrier oils and exfoliants.
- Scent — fragrance oils and/or essential oils.
- Colour — colorants, or none.
The batch size comes first because a scrub genuinely has one: you're filling jars. Type the finished weight in ounces — anywhere from 8 oz to 200 oz. Leave it blank and Hi Ellie sizes the formula at 32 oz and tells you so, which is a two-pound formula if what you wanted was three 4 oz jars.
Oil to exfoliant
A scrub recipe carries an oil : exfoliant ratio as its own spec, and the recipe page shows it that way — 3 : 1, say. The two phase weights on the page are derived from that ratio and the batch size. If a recipe's saved weights no longer recover the ratio it claims, the page says so and withholds the two weights rather than printing a pair it can't stand behind — the ratio itself still prints, because it is the recipe's own persisted value.
Your exfoliant comes off the Bath Ingredients shelf: sugar, salt, ground oats, coffee. The carrier oils come off the same shelf and off Oils & Butters — both feed the same picker.
Emulsified or anhydrous — the choice that matters
The Emulsified toggle sits on the Base step, next to the ingredients, because it decides what kind of base your picks are going into.
| Anhydrous (not emulsified) | Emulsified | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Oil and exfoliant only | Oil, exfoliant, and an emulsifier so the scrub rinses clean |
| In the shower | Leaves an oil film; the tub gets slippery | Rinses off with the water |
| Preservative | Not required — the recipe page says "Not required (anhydrous)" | Required — water reaches it in use |
An emulsified scrub is a water-contact product, so it carries a preservative just as a lotion does. Read Preserving water-based batches safely before you make one.
Hi Ellie doses the emulsifier for you from the app's own emulsifying-wax convention, and flags any bound line whose material isn't a complete emulsifying wax — a solubiliser, a foaming surfactant or a pearlizer will not emulsify a scrub on its own, and the note beside the Emulsified spec names the line. What the app deliberately does not do is publish a verdict that a given saved rate is correct: the right rate for each of those material classes is an open question here, so a recipe with an unusual emulsifier is left makeable and flagged rather than quietly graded.
Scent load
A scrub's scent is dosed against the total batch weight, ceiling 6% — the same as a bath bomb. See Scenting a Bath & Body recipe.
Colour and the tub
A scrub is worked on the skin and rinsed off; it is never dispersed through a tub of standing water. So the bath-water dispersal rules that govern a bath bomb don't apply to a scrub — its rinse-clean behaviour is the emulsifier's job, not the colorant's. See Getting oil and colour to disperse in bath water for which products that article is actually about.