Cucumbers are one of my favorite food items to use in homemade skin care. They not only help de-puff the skin and add hydration, they also help accelerate healing and even provide anti aging power. It’s simple and fun to make DIYs that contain cucumbers! Read on to find out about the amazing cucumber face mask benefits your skin will love!
Cucumber Face Mask Benefits:
Anti Aging-
Cucumbers have anti-inflammatory properties and are loaded with antioxidants and nutrients like vitamin C and folic acid. Vitamin C helps stimulate collagen and new cell growth. Folic acid helps protect against environmental toxins that can prematurely age your skin. Together, folic acid and vitamin C make cucumbers an effective anti aging tool.
Studies have shown that cucumbers have the ability to reduce swelling and puffiness of the skin.
According to a 2011 study, the antioxidant components in cucumbers may make it a potentially effective anti-wrinkle ingredient.
Healing & Calming-
The cooling and anti-inflammatory effect of cucumbers can help ease swelling from bug bites, soothe skin after a sunburn and calm irritation from rashes.
Hydration
Cucumbers are 96% water. Water isn’t enough to hydrate and moisturize the skin but when combined with other ingredients like Aloe Vera, yogurt, oats, oils and essential oils, cucumbers can help replenish the overall moisture content in the skin.
More DIY Cucumber Recipes:
- Cucumber Ice Facial
- Cucumber Aloe Toner with Chlorophyl
- Cucumber Green Tea Spritzer
- DIY Makeup Remover
DIY Cucumber Face Mask Ingredients:
While cucumber is the star of this DIY, I’ve added other ingredients that work along side it to boost the effectiveness of this mask!
This recipe is a nutrient packed feast for your skin!!
Yogurt is rich in replenishing cream as well as lactic acid which can gently remove dead skin. Yogurt also contains a good amount of zinc which when used topically, is helpful when needing to reduce the appearance of scars and sun/age spots. Plus, did you know that like our guts, are skin needs probiotics too? Maintaining skin biome bacteria balance is important for healthy skin.
Oats are cleansing as well as soothing and can relieve skin conditions like eczema and psoriasis.
Manuka Honey is healing and helps fight infection. It’s definitely one of my favorite ingredients for DIY Skin Care.
Dried lavender buds not only smell amazing, they also work to calm the skin and kill bacteria.
DIY Cucumber Face Mask Recipe:
- 2 TBSP. Full Fat Greek Yogurt
- 1 TBSP. Organic Oats (find it HERE)
- 1 TBSP. Cucumber (approximately a 1 inch slice)
- 1 tsp. Dried Lavender (find it HERE) *optional*
- 1 tsp. Manuka Honey (find it HERE) *optional*
- 1/2 tsp. fresh lemon juice *optional*
Directions & How to Apply:
- Add all oats and lavender to a coffee grinder and grind to a fine powder. Set aside.
- Using a food processor (I used my baby food mixer) add 1 tbsp. yogurt, cucumber, lemon and honey and blend.
- Transfer powder mixture and cucumber/yogurt mixture to bowl and mix or add powder to the processor and blend. Either way does the job.
- Add in another tablespoon of yogurt.
- Apply a thick layer to the skin.
- Leave on for 10-20 minutes.
- Rinse with cool water.
- Follow up with a toner and moisturizer.
A few recipe notes…
It can be difficult to mix such a small amount of cucumbers with no liquid in a blender. This is why I used a food processor. I also tried to mix the cucumbers in my coffee grinder. This worked to some degree. You can also just mask your cucumber slice with a fork. We just want to get the juice incorporated into our mask. Nothing has to be perfect.
If you’re wondering-I did try to mix all the ingredients, including the oats and lavender at the same time
in my baby food processor and it did not grind up the oatmeal and lavender buds thoroughly enough.
This mask is meant for a one time use. If you have some left over you may store in your fridge and use for a second time within 3 days.
If you don’t have Manuka Honey, raw honey is a good alternative.
If you don’t have dried lavender, you could substitute 3 drops of lavender essential oil.
Pro Tip:
Add your mixture to ice cube trays and freeze for prolonged shelf life as well as more anti inflammatory benefits! Applying ice cubes to the face has many amazing benefits!
You could add more cucumber to the recipe if you opt to freeze your mask. I didn’t add more then a 1 ounce slice because the unfrozen mask would be way too watery to apply to the skin. To do the cubes below, I added half a cucumber.
If you’re like me and love the smell of cucumber plus all it’s skin beautifying benefits, you should try out Thayers Cucumber Toner. I love incorporating this toner into my own toner recipes. It smells amazing and is so refreshing on the skin! I added it to my Green Tea Cucumber Spritzer recipe.
This is a really easy recipe to whip up and please don’t skip this recipe if you don’t have lavender or Manuka Honey. I added these ingredients as optional. They only boost the power of this recipe, they are not the important must-add ingredients. Your skin will love this mask either way!!
There are so many benefits of making a cucumber face mask! Let today be the day you experience the skin benefits of cucumber for yourself!
xx, Jenni
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P.S. This post was originally a guest post on The Paleo Mama’s website. I decided to update the “cooling cucumber mask” recipe in order to improve it. You can find the original post HERE.
