While Clayton was away for work I had a girls' night in with my friend Rachel (remember the Topless Undershirt giveaway?). We roomed together in San Francisco and always had such a blast together. We were always cooking something new, throwing a party, learning some craft or exploring the city, cameras over our shoulders.
We decided to have a do-it-yourself spa night and make all the spa treatments. It was so much fun! I felt like we were silly, city girls again! I was also reminded of the time I tried to take a bath in tea and clogged up the whole drain and we had to call a plumber...
Rachel came over armed with bottles of oils, fresh fruit and spices. I picked up some books
The first thing we did was one of my favorites. Rachel gathered some rose petals from the neighbor's rose bush. The blossoms were a bit past their prime, but perfect for a facial sauna. We added dried lavender buds and poured steaming hot water over it. Then we each spent a good ten minutes under a towel tent and emerged glowing and pink-cheeked.
Of course there were tea and cookies, and a spa-appropriate soundtrack provided by Rachel and Pandora.
Prior to the beauty queen mask (that's really what it was called) we used a sugar scrub with grape seed oil, lemon juice and lemon oil. My skin felt so buttery soft afterward.
Rachel used it on her hands and feet too. And you know what we used to take our mascara off beforehand? Olive oil! Why anyone even sells or buys eye makeup remover is beyond me; olive oil works so incredibly well, is so gentle on that delicate skin around your eyes and leaves your skin so nice and soft. I love it and I think I'm going to pour some into a little jar to just keep in the medicine cabinet.
The mask we used on our faces (the aforementioned Beauty Queen Mask) was made with egg yolks (courtesy of Rockefeller), pumpkin seed oil (which is apparently next to impossible to get in the states so Rachel's boyfriend has his dad send it from Europe. I hope he doesn't mind that we spread it all over our faces...), honey and an essential oil blend called Renaissance Mix.
The really crazy concoction was Rachel's avocado hair mask. We made it in my mortar and pestle, but later realized, when trying to spread chunks of avocado in our hair, that we probably should have used a blender.
This was the part that reminded me of clogging the tub with tea leaves. But this time I thought ahead and we went outside to shake the chunks of avocado out on the lawn before rinsing our hair in the tub. I'm sure Clayton, resident handyman, and Nellie and Rockefeller, resident food scroungers, all appreciated the gesture.
The recipe was an avocado, egg white and some essential oil. We pasted it onto our hair and sat in shower cap and saran wrap (that'd be me) and face masks and watched an episode of Glee before rinsing it all off and examining the results.
The verdict? We loved the facial sauna and the sugar scrub. I thought the Beauty Queen mask made my skin pretty soft, but it wasn't that dramatic of a transformation. And neither of us noticed a huge difference in the hair department, certainly not one worth the effort and avocado-covered bathroom. Although, even the treatments that didn't knock my socks off still seemed way more effective than 99% of the products I've purchased. And spa night was definitely a success in terms of relaxation and rejuvenation.
