There are all kinds of scrubs and exfoliants out there meant to cleanse and break down skin to leave it feeling even and soft. If you’ve never tried any scrubs before, you might want to try out some great coffee scrubs.
A coffee scrub is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a coffee bean-based scrub designed to cleanse your skin of oils and dirt and help smooth and repair damaged skin. Like all scrubs, coffee scrubs can be designed specifically with facial skin or body skin in mind and there are definitely some scrubs for both. When in doubt, just refer to the packaging to see what the brand recommends, whether face, body or both.
So that’s all well and good, but why coffee? Besides the wonderful smell of coffee and that my-face-is-officially-awake feeling, the answer is simple. Coffee beans are packed with antioxidants to help restore damaged skin and the gritty texture of ground-up coffee beans makes for a fantastic exfoliant and buffer to soften and smooth out dry and rough parts.
Coffee beans also contain, of course, caffeine, which not only wakes up your brain but also freshens up your skin by helping improve blood flow and minimizing redness and fine lines.
Many coffee scrubs will also use other ingredients to make them even more effective at cleaning, repairing and polishing your skin.
That’s why we’ve rounded up a few of our favorite coffee scrubs below. Whether you’re new to the scrub game or a seasoned scrubber, you might find coffee scrubs are the missing ingredient you’ve been looking for to upgrade your skincare routine.
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If you are new to the scrub game, before you check out our picks, you should know how to use this stuff. Thankfully, it couldn’t be simpler.
First, you gotta moisten your skin. Scoop out a couple of fingers worth of scrub at first and gently massage the scrub into your skin in a circular motion for two to five minutes. Rinse and repeat for all the skin you want to exfoliate.
Because the scrub is doing a lot of breaking down, you shouldn’t use it every day. Using it two to three times a week is best for most people.
Now without further ado, check out some of the best coffee scrubs below.
1. Frank Body Original Coffee Scrub
Don’t let the women-centered advertising fool you. The Frank Body Original Coffee Scrub works great for men’s skin too and promises to leave stretch marks, acne and cellulite in the past. (Dear marketing departments, dudes have stretch marks they might want to get rid of too.)
It includes robusta coffee grinds to stimulate blood flow and promote the development of collagen, multiple vegetable oils such as cold pressed sweet almond oil for extra hydration, vitamin E to fight off free radicals that age and damage skin and Dead Sea salt to help break down that dry, flaky skin as well as acne and scars.
If you’re looking for one of the most popular, best-reviewed, vegan coffee scrubs out there, you’ve found it with the Frank Body Original Coffee Scrub.
2. Amire Cosmeceuticals Arabica Coffee Scrub
The Amire Cosmeceuticals Arabica Coffee Scrub is an all-around great coffee scrub. It’s suitable for faces and bodies and will help tackle everything from cellulite, stretch marks and spider veins on your body to acne, age spots and eczema on your face.
Plus, Amire added argan oil and shea butter to its formula, so you’ll exfoliate like a boss while still hydrating and moisturizing your skin. Real Dead Sea salts add even more exfoliating power to the gritty coffee bean texture too.
Amire advises you to skip using this on your face if you have sensitive skin because, hey, this stuff is designed to break down dead skin.
Overall, the Amire coffee scrub has all the required trappings for a solid scrub and will totally soften and smooth out your skin.
3. Handcraft Blends Arabica Coffee Scrub
The Handcraft Blends Arabica Coffee Scrub offers a lot of the same benefits as the rest of these coffee scrubs. Most importantly, you can expect it to exfoliate and soften your face and body skin enough to make your significant other jealous. If you need it to, it’ll help to minimize cellulite and varicose and spider veins through increased blood circulation too. Natural oils will also be sure to help take care of stretch marks over time.
But while the benefits are similar, this formula uses some other ingredients we like. While we’ve seen Dead Sea salt, coconut extract, shea butter and sweet almond oil, we like the inclusion of vitamin-rich olive oil and antioxidant-rich cacao extract. Who would’ve figured coffee and chocolate not only taste great together but work together well on your skin too?
This scrub is also one of the best-reviewed coffee scrubs we found, with over 80% of reviewers giving it five stars.
4. Brooklyn Botany Arabica Coffee Scrub
If you’re looking for the great value in coffee scrubs, you’ll want to check out the Brooklyn Botany Arabica Coffee Scrub.
Many coffee scrubs come in 10-ounce or 20-ounce containers and this was the cheapest 20-ounce container we found, offering you 20 ounces of scrub for under $20.
But it’s not just a great value. This scrub uses an identical formula as the previous pick and promises to smooth out aging skin, repair damaged skin and stretch marks, reduce swelling and inflammation and leave your skin softer, smoother and more moisturized. It’s also suitable for faces and bodies, so you can give yourself a foot scrub with all that extra volume.
But just because two products use the same ingredients doesn’t mean they’re the same. For one, proportions of ingredients matter too and this scrub feels more thick, oily and balmy.
If that sounds appealing or at least tolerable given the great value, we think this will be one of the best coffee scrubs for you.
5. Mostory Arabica Coffee Scrub
For a cheap, basic, solid coffee scrub, we recommend the Mostory Arabica Coffee Scrub.
It includes a number of helpful ingredients to break down and hydrate your skin, such as vitamin E, coconut oil, olive oil and hyaluronic acid. In terms of application, this stuff mostly feels like Dead Sea salt and coffee grounds.
That’s mostly due to the size of the salt granules. They are quite big for a scrub, but when combined with the small coffee particles, the combo makes for one strong, exfoliating scrub.
The oils are there of course — they’re adsorbed onto the surface of the crystals — and they’ll absorb into your skin more the longer you leave the scrub on, but it basically does feel exactly like rubbing soft grainy salt on your body.
Overall, the Mostory coffee scrub offers strong exfoliation at a price point a few dollars cheaper than almost all the other coffee scrubs out there.
6. St. Ives Rise & Energize Coconut & Coffee Scrub
If you’re looking for a more name-brand coffee scrub, we’d point you toward the St. Ives Rise & Energize Coconut & Coffee Scrub. If you’ve ever used the St. Ives Apricot Scrub, then you know scrubs are kind of St. Ives’s thing. The coffee scrub offers the same kinds of benefits as its well-known apricot scrub cousin, only in a coconut and coffee formula instead.
St. Ives promises deep exfoliation with this coffee scrub and its signature exfoliation beads. The beads add coarseness to the texture, which will help smooth out your skin and really wake it up.
The only major downside is this formula doesn’t include, you know, actual coffee. It does have caffeine and it smells like coffee, but it doesn’t actually include any kind of coffee beans in the formula.
But hey, half the joy is the coffee smell and you still get the benefits of the caffeine as well as similar benefits from the coconut fruit extracts.
Despite its lack of actual coffee, this scrub still delivers great exfoliation and is guaranteed to leave your skin feeling softer and cleaner.
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