You have a pretty traditional morning routine. You wake with the sun, have a nice long stretch, hit the restroom, and then head straight for the coffee maker to brew up your morning eye-opener. But if you’re throwing away your coffee grounds after you have your daily cup of joe, then you may be missing out on some major beauty benefits that are both cheap and eco-friendly. Sure you know that coffee can be used in several green capacities around the house, from scouring pots to deodorizing the trash to nourishing certain plants in your garden (and of course, there’s always compost). But did you also know that it can fill in for several pricey beauty products that you’re probably already using? If you can’t seem to wrap your mind around the use of coffee to increase attractiveness, try out a few of these tricks to recycle your coffee grounds in a beautifying capacity.
Top 5 Green Beauty Tips Reusing Coffee Grounds
Deodorize. Just as used grounds can remove malodorous aromas around the house, they can also serve to return your hands to their scent-neutral state after cooking with garlic, onion, or other notable offenders. Just rub it onto your hands like soap while running them under warm water. Bonus: you’ll come away with a faint scent of appetizing Kona clinging to your mitts.
Scrub. Don’t shell out beaucoup bucks for those pricey salt or sugar scrubs. Simply save up about a cup of grounds and mix them with a fourth cup of oil (jojoba or sunflower seed oil should do the trick) to make a great smelling scrub that will get rid of rough knuckles, elbows, and heels and leave you smelling delicious. It is also rumored that rubbing this mixture onto areas that suffer from cellulite can make a difference in dimpling, but this is a dubious proposition at best.
Exfoliate. If you’re shooting for a facial, you don’t want to throw oil into the mix (sure it will hydrate, but you’ll have the added side effect of a massive breakout to contend with). Instead, try mixing your grounds with an egg white, scrubbing it onto the face, and then leaving the mixture to dry before washing it off. This will remove dead skin cells and leave you with a fresh-faced glow.
Cleanse. Coffee grounds may not sound like a good recipe for super-shiny hair, but putting in straight on your mane while warm and allowing it to soak in for 10-20 minutes before rinsing will leave your hair as lustrous as the girls in the Pantene commercials (without the toxic parabens). And if you rub it into your scalp a bit, you can also slough off some dead skin (an added bonus if you suffer from dandruff).
Detoxify. The thing that makes coffee great for deodorizing is that, like baking soda, it sucks up odors. This same property can be used to pull impurities from the skin. So pack your grounds in muslin baggies, soak them in hot water, and settle the warm compresses on your face to open pores and pull out toxins, leaving you with a clear complexion (not to mention a cleaner environment littered with less beauty-product castoffs).