These creamy, sugar-studded little nuggets of pumpkin-spicy goodness are like a hybrid between a mini scrub bar and a bath melt. They self-emulsify with your bath or shower water on your skin as you use them, turning into a creamy, mouth-watering scrub that buffs away dead skin and leaves you hydrated and glowing. Then, when you’re done scrubbing, the sugar dissolves and you’re left with a bath that pretty much has a self-emulsifying pumpkin spice bath oil in it—all pumpkin spice, skin-softening goodness, but no oily tub. Score!
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I’ve used a combination of two different emulsifiers (a complete emulsifying wax and a solubilizer) to ensure these nuggets instantly emulsify on damp skin, and they do—beautifully. On the first glide down a damp arm you’ll immediately notice creamy white, skin-softening goodness as the oils in the wee bars emulsify with the water on your skin, transforming into lotion. There are options for the emulsifiers (see the big list at the end of the recipe), but I don’t recommend eliminating either of them.
A blend of stearic acid and cetyl alcohol solidifies these scrubby nuggets to just the right point, which is a fairly fussy thing with a project like this. The nuggets need to be solid enough that they stay solid when you aren’t use them, but melt readily on your skin and in bath water that isn’t scaldingly hot (I’ve definitely made a few batches like that and you just end up with sad clumps of ick in your tub). If you live somewhere quite a lot hotter than I do, you may want to store these nuggets in the fridge; you’ll notice they soften quite readily at body temperature, so if your house is about body temperature… they will be very soft. If you make them harder they won’t melt as readily on your skin, so I suppose one could probably say that if it’s hot enough where you live that you don’t take baths, it’s probably also too hot to make these 😉
Our scent blend stars all the things I love paired with pumpkin—sweet vanilla with spicy accents from cinnamon bark, clove bud, ginger, and a titch of nutmeg. The scrubbiness comes from granulated white sugar. That’s just plain ol’ white sugar—not fancy large crystal or berry/caster sugar. You could also use table salt as an alternative, but salt + pumpkin spice just seemed wrong to me, even though we aren’t eating it 😝
Like most oily things this one is a simple weigh and melt, with some more stirring at the end to get that sugar to stay in suspension before we pour. I did it twice—once with an ice bath, and once without. It’s definitely much faster with an ice bath! Just be sure to stir constantly if you’re using an ice bath and have everything ready as it’ll set up much faster and you may find yourself scrambling for your mould if you don’t have it on hand from the get-go.
I’d recommend storing these in a wee tub or tin to keep them dry, and probably not in your bathroom since bathrooms tend to get hot and steamy on a fairly regular basis. Each nugget is a single-use-one-and-done thing as they are preservative-free, so keep that in mind when you choose your mould so you aren’t trying to use a scrub nugget the size of your fist in one go 😝Â Enjoy your Pumpkin Spice Scrub Nuggets!
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Pumpkin Spice Scrub Nuggets
5g | 0.18oz Polawax (USA / Canada)
4g | 0.14oz Polysorbate 80 (USA / Canada)
27g | 0.95oz fractionated coconut oil
9g | 0.32oz stearic acid (USA / Canada / UK)
2.5g | 0.088oz cetyl alcohol
1.5g | 0.053oz red kaolin clay0.25g | 2 drops Vitamin E MT-50 (USA / Canada)
2 “blobs” benzoin resinoid
5 drops cinnamon bark (Cinnamomum zeylanicum) essential oil
2 drops clove bud essential oil
2 drops CO2 extracted ginger essential oil
1 drop nutmeg essential oil (optional)2020 update: Given the irritation potential for this essential oil blend, I’d recommend using a pumpkin spice fragrance oil rather than the essential oil blend. Please refer to supplier documentation for maximum usage rates for the particular fragrance oil you’re using when used in in-bath products; 0.1–0.2% should be more than enough to adequately scent the product.
35g | 1.23oz white sugar (USA / Canada)
Prepare a water bath by bringing about 3cm/1″ of water to a bare simmer over low to medium-low heat in a small saucepan.
Weigh the polawax, polysorbate 80, fractionated coconut oil, stearic acid, cetyl alcohol, and kaolin clay into a small heat-resistant glass measuring cup. Place the measuring cup in your prepared water bath to melt everything through.
Once everything has melted through, remove the measuring cup from the heat, dry it off, and stir it occasionally as it cools (an ice bath will help cool this along, though you’ll have to stir constantly if you go that route lest it set up solid before you can pour it!). As it cools, prepare your mould by putting it on a plate so you can easily carry it to the fridge (this is especially important for floppy silicone moulds!).
When the mixture has a bit of viscosity to it, stir in the vitamin E, essential oils, and sugar. Keep stirring occasionally as the mixture cools (again, you can use an ice bath here, just be sure to stir constantly), until it has enough viscosity that the sugar doesn’t immediately settle out. At that point, pour it into your mould, and then quickly transfer the mould to your fridge to chill.
After about twenty minutes the nuggets should be all set up, though this will depend on the size of each nugget. Once they’ve set up, release them from the mould, taking care to handle them as little as possible—they melt quite readily on contact with skin!
Because these scrub nuggets do not contain any water, they does not require a broad-spectrum preservative (broad spectrum preservatives ward off microbial growth, and microbes require water to live—no water, no microbes!). Be sure to keep it dry to ensure it lasts as long as possible—don’t let any water get into the container and it should easily last a year. Each nugget is a single-use thing, so choose your mould size accordingly. Once the nugget gets wet, use it all up in one go!
Substitutions
- You can use Emulsifying Wax NF instead of Polawax. You could also use BTMS-50, but it’s definitely more expensive than the other two options and you’ll just be washing it down the drain, so it seems like a waste to use it here.
- You can use Olivem300 (NOT 1000!) instead of Polysorbate 80
- You can use a different lightweight, inexpensive liquid carrier oil instead of the fractionated coconut oil (think safflower, sunflower, canola, grapeseed, sweet almond, etc.)
- You can probably use more stearic acid instead of the cetyl alcohol, but not the other way around. The melting point of these little nuggets is quite carefully balanced, so messing with these ingredients can really throw off the entire recipe.
- You can use any warm/brownish clay instead of red kaolin, like French red or even rhassoul—it’s just for colour. You could also use white kaolin if you don’t care for the colour.
Hello Marie, I love this recipe. Just one problem…it-s almost impossible to find Benzoin Resinoid oil in Italy. Is there any substitution? Could honey be a substitute? Thanks.
Hey Anna! When making substitutions you need to be sure to replace the purpose of the ingredient. Benzoin is there to add the vanilla scent, so honey is in no way a substitute (sort of like using syrup instead of basil in a recipe lol). You can use something else vanilla scented, like a vanilla fragrance oil. You can’t use vanilla oleoresin as it is water soluble.
Hi, Marie. Looks like another lovely recipe but I have a question. Wouldn’t the polawax and/or the polysorbate 80 be enough to emulsify the water soluble vanilla into the oils? Just wondering, haven’t tried anything like that before.
Hmm. Perhaps. Both of those emulsifiers are designed to emulsify small amounts of oil into large amounts of water, and you’d being doing exactly the opposite thing (small amount of a water soluble ingredient in a large amount of oil).
Something else I’ve thought of. Precisely because vanilla oleoresin is insoluble in oil, you can use it to make a vanilla infused oil. Just drop a dollop of it into a bottle containing the oil you want to infuse. It sits at the bottom nicely. About a quarter sized blob per 8 oz. of oil. I’ve done both jojoba and almond that way. Going to try FCO next but can’t see why it wouldn’t work. I’ve also done vanilla beans in oil for the same use. Best part, you can leave the oleoresin in the bottle and add more oil as needed. Takes about a week to get a nice infusion.
Kudos to Andrea Butje of Aromahead Institute for this fabulous idea. And her vanilla, coconut, cocoa and (steam distilled) lime lip balm is to die for. Has to be one of the most requested lip balms I get from all my gifting (along with your cocoa mint balm!)
How interesting! Looks like I need to buy myself another bottle, my last one just ran out 🙂
Out of curiosity how do you think this would work without the sugar? I am looking to make a in shower moisturizer and was thinking of formulating one from an emulsified sugar scrub (minus the sugar), but I like the one use idea of these!
I think they’d likely be even softer without the sugar, so you would want to tweak the amounts of the stearic acid and cetyl alcohol to create something useable 🙂
I LOVE all of your creations! You are so clever! I love the idea of these nuggets and I am anxious to make them, but how many ounces are they each and how many does this recipe make? I just want to know what to prepare for.
Thank you!!
Thanks! Remember, to get batch sizes just add up the ingredients 😉 And of course, the size of each and the number you get is 100% dependant on the mould you use.
I was curious about batch size as well.
It is kind of hard to tell if we would want to halve or double the recipe.
It would be nice to know how big a ‘one shower’ scrub would be.
Even if you told us the diameter of the ones you made and how many you got out of that batch would be great and easier to judge.
Thanks! And the recipe sounds yummy!!
Watch the video 🙂 Then you can really see everything to scale! The little nuggets in the photos are about 1″ across and as you can see, I got 3 or 4 (video vs. blog).
Oops, sorry, I didn’t think of watching the video.
Thanks for your reply Marie.
I’ve made a really nice emulsifying foot scrub bar which is quite hard.
I think I’ll give this a go for my winter showers 🙂
Enjoy! 😀
Can we just completely omit the benzoin resinoid? Is it necessary for the recipe or just there to make the scrubs smell nice?
Yup! It’s just there for vanilla scent 🙂
I just made a batch of these this morning. Here are my observations:
~They smell yummy!
~They are softer than I’d thought they’d be, kind of like chilled cookie dough.
~After more than 30 minutes in the refrigerator, they did not come out of the mold cleanly. I used the same size batch as yours and made 4 nuggets. Chill in freezer next time?
~Yours look smooth; mine look grainy (like sugar).
~They feel nice to use, and they rinse off cleanly.
~I wouldn’t shower with them every day, as they’d be too scrubby for my hands, but I can’t wait to try them on my feet.
~Pumpkin powder must be water soluble, as it didn’t mix with the other ingredients. Next time I’ll use clay =).
~I used a few drops of Vanilla 5th Dark Oil (Texas Natural Supply) in place of the benzoin and it worked fine.
~I also subbed avocado oil for fractionated coconut, as I was out of that.
Next time around I’ll use the fractionated coconut oil and clay.
Bottom line: I’d make these again, working to get better color and a smoother release from the mold.
Thanks so much for sharing your results! It does sound like a freezer chill would work better for you—perhaps your house is warmer than mine, so they softened up more/faster when removing them from the fridge? Enjoy and thanks for DIYing with me!
Hey Marie. I Made these yesterday, tried them today. They are so much fun. I was able to stick to the recipe as written. But I didn’t have the right essential oils, so I added a few pinches of their matched spices. It worked out great, since I think the dry spices helped to firm the nuggets up a bit. They still melted great in the shower, and left me all smooth, soft, and pie-y. Well done You.
YAY! I’m so glad 🙂 Thanks so much for reading and DIYing with me!
Could I make them with out the sugar like an in shower moisturizer?
If I make one large bar of in shower moisturizer what kind of preservative to be used? I have heard Phenonip doesn’t go with Poly sorb
Wanted to try making something like Lush King of skin kind of in shower moisturizer bar
They’d be much too soft for anything more than a single use—they will squish and mash straight away—so no preservative needed, just leave out the sugar and make them small 🙂
I am making a mocha theme gift basket. I made a mocha version of this recipe by using cocoa powder instead of clay to color the nuggets. I also included a tsp of ground coffee beans then topped it off with essential oils. They ended up looking like candy.
Oh my goodness, this sounds downright decadent. Swoon!
I just made these lovelies! I love how the emulsify before my eyes when I rub them on my skin. I did find the sugar a bit too rough for my skin. Do you have an idea for an exfoliant that would be a little softer but still somewhat effective?
Thank you for this amazing source of diy wisdom. I am so grateful!
I’m so glad! You could try a finer sugar (something like berry sugar), less sugar, or look at something like jojoba beads or ground walnut shells 🙂
WOULD BEESWAX WORK TO MAKE THESE A LITTLE HARDER?
Yes, but I wouldn’t recommend it. The reason it isn’t present in the original formulation is because I find it leaves a really unpleasant, tacky, waxy film on the skin in products like this. I’d increase the stearic acid instead; give this FAQ a read 🙂
Hi Marie can i ask why not to use olivem 1000? its all i have right now
thanks for all your great recipes
Please look up both Olivem 300 and Olivem 1000 in the Humblebee & Me DIY Encyclopedia (https://www.humblebeeandme.com/diy-encyclopedia/) 🙂