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When stocking up on skincare products and toiletries in anticipation of a harsh summer, the one item we give a royal snub is bath salt. Despite coming in pretty packages, loaded with fancy ingredients, and giving off a sweet scent, we walk past the bath salt display rack in a cosmetic shop and proceed to fetch our facial gels and body creams. Blame it on its pretentious price tag or the popular perception relegating these glittering bathing crystals to the smooth atmosphere of a spa, we have never really explored beyond its expensive packaging. The benefits of bath salt are many, and go beyond mere exfoliating dead cells to make skin soft and supple. A nice long soak in a tub sprinkled with bath salt releases muscle tension and improves common irritations such as insect bites, minor rashes, calluses on the feet, while working on serious skin conditions like athlete's foot, eczema, and psoriasis.

How To Pick Your Bath Salt

Always ensure the bath salt is crystalline not lumpy, and contain all natural ingredients and nutrients. Available on the market in a rainbow of colors, choosing the right bath salt can be quite a task for a novice. Your choice of bath salt should depend on what you wish to achieve in the bath. Cool hues such as blues and purples are generally soothing, while warm hues such as orange and yellow are energizing. Besides, the benefits of bath salt differ with grain size, for instance, finer grains dissolve quickly and work well as skin scrubs. One can even enhance the benefits of bath salt by infusing it with essential oils such as lavender or vanilla.

Popular Summer Bath Salts

Orange: It has a fresh, sweet, citrus smell, and helps soothe dry, irritated skin as well as acne-prone skin. Excellent for rubbing on calluses on the feet.

Lavender: Eases nervous tension, relieve pain, disinfects scalp and skin, enhances blood circulation and treats respiratory problems. The benefits of lavender can be attributed to its antiseptic and antifungal properties, hence the best scent to treat skin disorders including wounds and sunburns.

Lemongrass: Bathing in water infused with lemongrass bath salts revitalize the body and relieves symptoms of jetlag, clears headache, and busts stress.

Benefits of Bath Salts

1. Bath salts are known to be the secret of youthful and healthy skin. Actually, bath salts contain minerals and nutrients (like potassium, magnesium, bromide, calcium, sodium) that make your skin look smooth.Moreover, it allows your skin to have a natural glow by doing away with impurities. It helps to detoxify the skin and cleanse it thoroughly.
2. It lets you have a luxurious and soothing shower experience that helps you to relax in a wonderful way!
3. Bath salts are known to deliver amazing health benefits too, like lowering of blood pressure and treating soreness of muscles apart from treating other problems like itchiness and insomnia.
4. Bath salts can also be used as cleansers and scrubs, and thus makes you experience something more than a lush showering experience.

Step By Step Guide To Use Bath Salts

1. Take out a large metal or glass bowl (plastic and wood are too porous, and would absorb the scent of the essential oil), and a metal spoon (again, no wood or plastic). Pour in the Epsom salts and sea salts and mix well.
2. Let the five drops of red and five of blue food colouring fall spread across the surface of the salt mixture. Then do the same with the drops of lavender essential oil. Mix thoroughly. This can take a lot of stirring, since the food colouring and essential oils tend to clump together. Once there are no longer any clumps of food colouring you can generally count on the essential oils being well-mixed too.
3. Now add the cup of baking soda and mix well. The baking soda needs to be added last, because it works much better if the essential oils and food colourings are spread thin first (they would clump much worse if added to a mix with baking soda in it).
4. Finally, mix in the dried lavender blossoms. These are added last so that all of the mixing doesn't beat them up too much.
5. Store the bath salt mixture in an airtight glass or metal container.

So the next time you plan to pamper yourself, get yourself a stress free riveting session with bath salt.