How to Create a Luxury Spa Experience At Home (it’s Easier than you Think!)

For most people, going to a luxury spa is the ultimate self-care, pampering experience.

It would be amazing to have access to the decadent products, exclusive treatments, and relaxing atmosphere of a luxury spa whenever and wherever we wanted it. But who has got the time, money, and ability to go to a luxury spa every single week—or even just once a month?

For most of our budgets, and our busy lives, that just isn’t realistic. So a spa experience becomes, at best, a very special, one-time treat, if we go at all. (And if one is even in your area!)

But what if you could create a luxury spa experience at home?

It’s not as out of reach as you might think! You have the power to create not only the spa-quality, luxury products, but also to make a soothing, indulgent, and nurturing space for self-care within the comfort of your own home!

Defining the Space for Self-Care

Bathing has been seen as a luxurious activity since ancient times. Going to the spa is relaxing, refreshing, revitalizing, and rejuvenating. It’s good for the soul, mind, and body—the whole being.

What is it about the spa experience that makes it so special?

For some, it’s the social aspects of sharing a relaxing self-care day with friends! For others, it’s the time to step away from the hassles of the world and the cares of your busy, stressful life, and just let go for a while.

Either way, you can begin to craft the ambience for that at-home spa experience by thinking about what aspects you personally find relaxing. It doesn’t have to be exotic or expensive, or even perfect. It just has to fit your needs, and speak to you.

Here are some ideas to get you started:

• Is there a space in your home that can be set aside for pampering? It might be a bathroom, or a corner of your bedroom. Clear a space where you can sit and relax for the ultimate pampering experience.
• One great way to create ambience for your home spa is with music. You could choose relaxing instrumental, classical, folk, or nature sounds. (There are plenty of great videos available online, and you can play them right on your phone for free! Or create a Spotify playlist with your favorites: Gareth loves Ludovico Einaudi!)
• Think about using low lighting, or even candlelight, to soften and relax your mood as you enter your home spa area. (Always be safe with candles, of course!)
• The scent you choose for your at-home spa can match the energy you want to create: Relaxing and calming lavender, frankincense, benzoin, chamomile; refreshing and revitalising lemongrass, orange, bergamot, geranium, or lime; or awakening and invigorating scotch pine, rosemary, eucalyptus, or peppermint. Put them in a diffuser or oil warmer—It’s completely up to you! Here’s our guide to Getting the most from your essential oil burner or diffuser
• You can select an herbal tea to fully awaken your senses, inside and out. Depending on your mood and goals, it could be a healing, cleansing, detoxifying tea, or a calming and relaxing tea, or a reviving, refreshing and invigorating tea… there’s so much to choose from!
• What about a lovely, plush robe and soft towel, or some other special set of soft and easy going garments which you only use for this spa, to really make the experience pampering?
• A few simple tools are really all you need: What about a scrubbing brush, pumice stone, nail clippers, any massage aids you prefer. You could even try jade rolling!
• Beautiful, but not necessary, are things like fresh-cut flowers, special crystals or other soothing objects that can be used to decorate your space. What brings you peace and serenity?

Your Home Spa Experience

Now that you’ve set the space for your at-home luxury spa day, you’re ready to decide what treatments you want to do!

A relaxing bath or footbath

To start with, a bath is a wonderful way to unwind, relax, revitalize the mind, body, and senses. Bathing is also a powerful way to renew your body as well! It helps to lower blood pressure and heart rate, lengthen and slow down our breathing, promote calmness and relaxation, bring warmth to the body, alleviate aches and pains, and cleanse the skin… all of which boosts our own body’s power of renewal.

You could do a full bath, or a foot bath—but either way, there are loads of amazing options for a soak, from the simplicity of fresh flower petals and a handful of epsom salt to even more luxurious products that you can make at home.

• Try our Foaming Orange, Frankincense and Sandalwood Mineral Bath Soak

Bath bombs

One product that’s as fun to make as it is to use is a bath bomb.

Working from a basic formula, you can customize it to suit your needs so easily! Tough day at work? Try a relaxing lavender bath bomb. Need an invigorating wake-up to start the day at home with the kids with energy? Citrus Mint is sure to put a spring in your step. Have a date night planned with your special someone? Sandalwood and rose sets the mood, and perfumes your skin beautifully. Just toss the bomb in the water and it will fizz and dissolve into a soak that’s out of this world.

• Try our Rose and Cocoa Butter Bath Truffles

Body scrub

Another excellent and customizable home-spa product you can make is a body scrub.

Packed with deceptively simple, yet beneficial ingredients, sugar scrubs exfoliate and condition the skin—and use ingredients that won’t contribute to plastic pollution, like some products made with beads or pellets. A scrub can be as simple as combining the right proportion of white sugar with a nourishing carrier oil and an essential oil of your choice.

For a real treat, choose an emulsified scrub. This delightful rendition will allow the oil in the scrub to turn into a creamy lotion when it meets water and your skin. Once you’ve tried one of these scrubs you are sure to be hooked. Your skin will glisten, be baby soft, and smell divine. Here’s a tip: Scrub before shaving for the smoothest legs you’ve ever had!

(As an added bonus, emulsified scrubs will not attach themselves to the side of your tub as stubbornly as an oil only (anhydrous) scrub!)  

Just a few simple ingredients make up this exhilarating, skin-smoothing body scrub. Want to learn how to make it at home?

• Coconut Coffee Body Scrub recipe

Be careful, though, and avoid using salt or sugar scrubs on your face. While these scrubs are perfect for the body, they are just a bit too much for our delicate facial skin.

Face mask

Instead, if you’re looking for facial exfoliation while you soak, choose a clay, a gelled lactic acid, or sheet mask for the delicate facial skin. Add a hydrating and tightening caffeine and hyaluronic acid mask formulated specifically for under eyes to condition and brighten this fragile area.

Want to learn how to make an amazing antioxidant face mask with matcha, honey, and orange blossom? Check this one out:

• Vitamin C Antioxidant Face Mask

Body butter or lotion

Once you’ve found the willpower to exit that luxurious tub (be careful when stepping onto the floor after that conditioning scrub!) your skin is primed to take full advantage of a nutritive-filled body butter or lotion. Consider choosing one that includes cocoa butter. Cocoa butter possesses occlusive properties, meaning it will greatly reduce water loss from our skin. Certainly, we want to give our skin the full advantage of that nice long soak and let the moisture hydrate for as long as possible.  

Check out this article—complete with a free recipe for a nourishing cocoa body butter—to help you get started:

• 5 ways to use nourishing cocoa butter (plus a free recipe!)

These four simple things—bath bomb or soak, sugar body scrub, facial mask, and body lotion—are just a few of the wonderful, decadent products that you can incorporate into your home spa-day routine. You can also include specialized treatments for trouble spots, customized scent combinations, and they’re all things that you can make at home!

So why not give it a go?

What’s In Your Luxury Products?

If you’re someone who is drawn to putting only the finest, most natural and eco-conscious products on your body, then you’ll already likely be aware that there are many ingredients used in commercially-available products—even products labeled as natural or organic—that you probably don’t want to be using. This includes ingredients that either don’t conform to your natural and organic values, or ones that are synthetic, harsh/irritating, petroleum-derived or animal-derived.

Spa products are quite likely better quality than the average product found in a department store or supermarket, but not always! And you may or may not be able to look at the label of the products used at a spa.

So many products contain ingredients that we either don’t like, don’t trust, know cause harm or irritation, don’t conform to our value system or that we just don’t want to use on our skin—doesn’t it make sense to make your own? That takes all the wondering and guesswork out of the equation, and puts you in control.

Spa products usually also carry a premium price tag! Bath salts for example can often cost in excess of $50 for a small tub when they are actually a low cost product to make for yourself. So by creating your own spa products you’ll both know exactly what is in them and save yourself a huge amount of money too.

In our article about creating a skincare ritual, we emphasized the importance of creating an approach to skincare that honors your inner beauty as well as nourishes your skin. Sometimes, it’s not just the change in products we use, but the change in our approach to how we honor ourselves that can bring out the happiness and positivity we want to see in our lives.

It’s our intention that makes our routine more magical, more meaningful. And the change we can make in ourselves and in the world around us can start with you.

Where to Get Started

If you’re brand-new to all of this, and inspired to start making your own products, take a look at some of the recipes we provide and try them out! And then, hop on over to our Certificate in Natural Skincare to learn more about customizing recipes to suit your needs. If you really want to learn everything you need to know to formulate your own amazing range of spa products from scratch, and come out with a professional quality result for a fraction the price of shop bought brands, then the Diploma in Natural Skincare Formulation is for you. You can develop the skill, confidence and knowledge required to stand on your own two feet and make whatever product you choose! Whichever course you choose, we’re excited to welcome you to our vibrant online global community and to helping you to make your own gorgeous natural and organic beauty products, for yourself or to sell.

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