Green Tea Recipes: Scrubs, Serums and Masks

Continuing with our green tea theme, this week we focus on some other gorgeous skincare recipes using our star product: facial scrubs, masks and serums. Green tea is a surprisingly versatile addition to cosmetics and you can add it to the aqueous or botanical infusion part of any recipe.

Making A Green Tea Botanical Infusion

As referenced in Green Tea For Skin, here is a reminder of how to make up a good batch of green tea infusion for cosmetic use:

1. Prepare your botanical infusions with distilled water, or at the very least, boiled and slightly cooled filtered water. Making up an infusion is very much like making tea. Green tea is best using water at 82 ℃, as boiling water may 'cook' the delicate green tea leaves. If you are using the powdered version of green tea leaves like we are, then you might want to drop the water temperature even lower to about 75℃.
2. So boil then slightly cool your water before pouring over your tea leaves.
3. You can then leave to infuse for as little as an hour or covered overnight.

To preserve and store your infusions:

• Sterilise any utensils and containers you are using in the infusion making process, as the key is to eliminate as much bacteria as possible.
• Filter the green tea leaves out of your infusion with a filter paper.
• Prep a storage bottle (these ones are great) by sterilising it with boiling water.
• Stir in your preservative to your filtered infusion, then pour into your prepared storage bottle.
• Cap and store in the fridge for maximum shelf life. Cold green tea also feels amazing on the skin! An alternative storage method is to fill a sterilised ice tray with the green tea infusion and freeze into ice blocks. These can then be applied directly to the face to shrink pores, or melted and used in a recipe.

Green Tea & Peppermint Facial Scrub

Green tea and mint is a divinely refreshing combination that smells like summer.

This scrub is particularly good after a hot day when you just want to really get all the grime and sweat out of every pore. It will leave your skin feeling clean, fresh and glowy. The added oliveM 300 makes it easy to clean off as it combines nicely with water into a creamy scrub.

Ingredients:

• ¼ - ⅓ c castor sugar or fine Himalayan salt
• 2 Tblsp green tea powder
• 1 tsp peppermint powder
• 2 Tblsp marula oil
• 1 heaped tsp avocado butter
• 1 T oliveM 300
• This jar with a silver lid looks very attractive

Method:

1. Melt the avocado butter.
2. While it's melting, stir the castor sugar, green tea and peppermint powder together in a bowl.
3. Add in the melted avocado butter, marula oil and oliveM 300.
4. Blend until it gets nice and fluffy, then decant into a jar.

To use, scoop out a small amount on your finger and massage into your skin, then rinse off and apply hydrosol, serum and/or moisturiser.