Chocolate is truly the food of the gods.  You can eat it plain or with nuts, in cookies and cakes, drizzled over scones, and  melted with whipped cream on top.  You can also rub it on your skin, for various reasons (hey, whatever you do as a consenting adult in your own time is none of my business), and one of those reasons might be skin exfoliating.

It’s no secret that I happen to love the benefits that good food gives you from the inside and the outside.  I mean, this blog even has a whole page of foodie skin care tips utilizing home made concoctions of various foodstuffs.  Well here is one more: a chocolate body scrub.

When I found this recipe on Betty Confidential, I was pretty excited (I mean, it’s chocolate!) and I also thought it would be nice to make some up as gifts for the rapidly approaching holiday season (they are playing Christmas music already, did you know that?!).  It was also an interesting recipe because it called for an ingredient that I knew about but never had much cause to actually experiment with: chocolate nibs.  These little bites are the center of the cacao bean and the epitome of chocolate; the outer shell is removed and the nibs are roasted. 

I almost never see these anywhere but luckily for me, the Spice Merchant in Kerrytown had them.  I love that place for esoteric little gems like this!  I picked up the oils from Whole Foods and everything else was straight out of my pantry.

This was the line up when I started making the scrub.

After grinding down the oats, I added in the cocoa, chocolate nibs, salt, vitamin E oil and sweet almond oil—I used that exclusively instead of paying for that AND jojoba oil.  Plus the foodie in me was tickled by the idea of chocolate and almond together…delicious.  I pulsed it all together a few times and…

became

and that was it.  I poured it into a clean glass jar; I’ll have to look around and find fancier jars and labels before I make up a batch of gifts  But besides that, making this took all of two minutes.  It’s great.  What you want to do is keep it near your shower and scoop out some with a spoon (or fingers or whatever—they also recommend a “seashell” but what is this, Demolition Man?  I have seashells in my bathroom?) and rub it everywhere you like.  The scratchy texture from the nibs and salt will exfoliate your skin while the oils  will keep it soft and luscious.  After a minute, rinse the scrub off with some warm water.

Ta da.  Happiness: now in topical form.