Makeup & Beauty

DIY Sugar Lip Exfoliator

My lips are a mess lately. Red, chapped, painful, flaky, all that.

I carry lip balm with me everywhere I go and apply it like a nut, but still: they’re a mess. It’s the whole dry-heat-inside/winter-air-outside thing; it just does a number on me.

The past few days have been especially bad, so last night I went on a hunt for some very fancy and expensive lip exfoliator that I remembered picking up at an event months and months ago. Alas, it appears that the very fancy and expensive lip exfoliator was sacrificed to The Moving Gods.

But you know what I did find while searching for a fix for my flakiness?

Brown sugar.

Honey.

And a huge jar of delicious-smelling coconut oil that’s been sitting in my refrigerator forever and ever, and that I’ve had no idea what to do with until now.

Seriously, that’s all you need…and if you don’t have coconut oil, you can easily swap in olive oil (the finished product won’t smell as beachy, that’s all).

Start with oil (coconut oil hardens in the refrigerator, so just return it to liquid form by heating gently in a pan of warm water)…

Add equal parts sugar (white sugar is fine, too)…

And honey…

And mix well.

Apply to lips with a damp toothbrush and scrub gently for thirty seconds or so, then rinse off.

Much better.

(This makes a lovely DIY gift, by the way; just fill a sterilized baby food jar with scrub and tie a bit of twine around the top to make it pretty.)

Pictured: Catbird First Knuckle Ring, Sophia Forero ruby ring, Deborah Lippmann x Narciso Rodriguez Stormy Weather nail polish.

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