Helloooo friends!
Happy Monday morning! So happy to be here blogging again. I think it’d be fun to publish a new blog post once a week in 2021 – I’m thinking every Friday – and how about I start with the posts in my Drafts folder? 😉 I polled everyone on IG last weekend about which draft I should publish first – my secret weapon skin serum DIY, my Instant Pot faves, an STG adventure, or a house update – and my skin serum post was voted for the most, so I’m excited to give this post her moment to shine! But really, since my skin serum that has given my skin a legit shine, and I’d love nothing more than to share the secrets with you.
You might remember when I shared my clean, improved skin and makeup products and routine back here, which is when I first started using Just Ingredients’ skin serum to help my skin heal (from scars, wrinkles, breakouts), and to help my skin start aging better. I saw a major difference in my skin with that product: way clearer skin, far fewer blemishes and breakouts, reduced fine lines and pregnancy-induced-malasma spots — all the things! It made me so happy. I bought that serum for a few months before looking into how to make my own, simply because I decided I was going to be a “skin serum” life-er and I didn’t want to pay $20ish/bottle every 3 months. I started searching for skin serum/glow serum recipes online and found some great ones (Google first dished up this blog post for me and it’s awesome), and I realized that I really could make my own serum for forever! Made me so happy. 🙂 If you research on your own how to make a skin/glow serum, you’ll see that there are ton of ways you can do it – there are lots of fun essential oils to add in for extra oomph (my friend, Erica, often puts together a really yummy looking serum on her IG page here), and you can pick different base oils that best fit your skin’s needs. Whatever you decide to do here (cue Nike!) – JUST DO IT. Really, though, I haven’t seen happier Jeni skin in all my years. I actually call my serum a “secret weapon” because I use it for everything now — scrapes on the girls, diaper rash — I try the serum on any skin-related issue and I have yet to see it not help. My sisters and mom started using it in the Spring and their skin has improved, too (all of you 20-25-year-olds out there – get on this train stat! My little sister, Kimbee, has baby looking skin, and I only wish I would’ve started using this stuff earlier, like her)! Even Ryan started using it after he saw that his skin was aging, and his pores have shrunk and his skin has tightened up. Boom goes the dynamite.
My tried-and-true skin serum recipe is pretty simple: frankincense, orange and grapefruit essential oils mixed with jojoba oil. Jojoba oil is a fail-proof skin moisturizer – it’s nice to all skin types – and frankincense and citrus oils are soooo good to the skin, too. Here are my specifics:
MY SECRET WEAPON SKIN SERUM
jojoba oil – fill the 2 oz. dropper bottle with a funnel to save time!
grapefruit oil – 10-15 drops
orange oil – 10-15 drops
frankincense oil – 10-15 drops
Mix it all together, and voila! You have your secret weapon now, too. I use 5-6 drops on my face and neck every morning and night after washing my face and applying my toner. The best.
Thanks to my sister, Kimbee, for hand modeling in those pics above. She helped me take these shots back in September right after I had made another bottle of the serum (which is when I decided that I really wanted to blog about this magical stuff)! Now the pictures below, well, they are a different story, ha! Ry took them for me on a whim last Friday as I was writing this post because it was feeling incomplete without a “results” picture! Of course I’m juuuust a little uncomfortable sharing a gigantic, up-close photo of my make-up free face, but I’ll do it for you because we’re friends and that’s how much I love you. 😉 I’m only wearing mascara here — no foundation, no eyebrow gel, no nothin.’ My skin definitely isn’t the picture of perfection (see that little melasma spot between my eyebrows and hairline? Such gift to me from Chloe’s pregnancy, although it was soo dark when I was pregnant), but it’s way better than it was and gosh it’s good enough for me. It’s cliche, but I can say that I love the skin I’m in, and I’m grateful for that since I haven’t always felt that way!
One last FYI – I picked up all of my serum ingredients above at my local health food store (Dixie Nutrition!) but the products I linked above are the exact products I use. The jojoba and frankincense oils are a tad investment up-front, but for me, it beats out buying pre-made serum so frequently. I did the math and saw that I could keep spending $20 per serum bottle every 3 months for $80/year, OR I could make this investment upfront: $25 Jojoba + $50ish frankincense (depends on where you get it) + $8.00 orange EO + $12.00 grapefruit EO = $95.00. Since my 16 oz. jojoba bottle will fill my 2oz dropper bottle 8 times (16/2=8), I’ll make around 8 bottles of serum before my bottle of Jojoba oil runs out, and since I go through about 4 bottles of serum per year, I’m looking at $95.00 to carry me through the next 2ish years (my EO’s will definitely last that long – I only use them for the face serum)! IN OTHER WORDS (now that math class is done, haha!) — it made sense to me to just invest and do this thing DIY! Also, in case it helps to know, I took some baby steps into getting my ingredients. I first bought my own jojoba oil and I borrowed my mom’s frankincense oil, and then a few months later when my serum ran out, I bought my own frankincense.
Happy skin care-ing, friends! So glad you’re here going through life with me, even via taking care of our smiling faces. 🙂 See you on Friday for a little house update!
xoxoxo
