Making a DIY Spa Night -- Fun and Frugal

Recently, my daughters asked me if we could do something fun together, and I wanted to think of something that would be nice but not too expensive, and I thought to make a spa night at home. This was very frugal and something my daughters really enjoyed. It actually was not the first time I did a spa night, I did one before with just myself and my oldest daughter, Anneliese, for a mother daughter bonding time when my other kids were away. Once I was already doing a spa night for my daughters, I invited their friend to join us, and surprisingly (to me), even my sons decided to join in.

I must confess that for this last spa night it was me doing everything for everyone, but that was cool with me, they all had a good time and I was ok doing the work.

There is no limit to how many different spa things you can do at home, so I'm not going to share every single thing that is available, just what we did together.

First, I wanted to set the atmosphere for the spa night, because just sitting around as we usually would do would feel less like being at a spa. So I put on a nice tablecloth and lit a bunch of tea lights all over, and then turned off the lights, so that the whole place was just lit by the flickering candles. I put on a playlist of relaxing spa type music and with that, the mood was set.

The first thing we did was sugar scrubs. I mixed some sugar and coconut oil (based on a recipe I read online) and then massaged it into everyone's faces. (Just a warning, this ended up getting messy. Which was part of the fun, I guess, but in the future, I'd suggest putting a towel draped around people's necks and their hair in a ponytail so the sugar scrub stays on the face and doesn't get anywhere unwanted.

I then took towels, which I soaked in hot water (but not too hot so no one gets burned) and used that to wipe the sugar scrub off everyone's faces. It left them feeling refreshed and also did a good job of cleaning it off.

Next was facials. I found a whole bunch of different recipes using things we had at home already and were easy to do, and was contemplating between a yeast mask (good for dry skin), an egg white mask (good for oily skin), an egg yolk mask (for dry skin) and a whole egg mask (for regular skin) and decided to go the easy way out and just use a whole egg, which I whisked and then massaged onto everyone's faces (facial massage and mask together, why not?)

While the masks were sitting on their faces, I then prepared a foot soak. Finding large enough containers for everyone to put their feet into to soak was actually the hardest part here. An easy enough mouth wash based foot soak is suggested in many places, for various reasons such as fungal removal, removing dead skin cells, and dry skin, and while those weren't specific goals of mine, I figured the nice minty smell would be refreshing and fun. So I put warm water in to soak their feet and added a decent amount of mouth wash. This was the most expensive part but even that wasn't too expensive, probably because I added much less than the "recommended amount" of mouthwash, but who cares, it was just part of the experience, and even if we used the full amount it is still pretty inexpensive.

And then, just because, I went to each person one by one and gave them a shoulder massage while they were sitting there soaking their feet with the mask on.

Then it was time to remove the masks, which I did with hot water soaked towels as before, and then everyone dried their feet off with other towels.

As you can imagine, this made a lot of laundry, but hey, that's what washing machines are for, yes? 

Everyone enjoyed themselves (yes, even me, who was doing the stuff instead of getting stuff done to me) and they were all disappointed when we were finished and lights went on and life went back to normal. 

Have you ever done spa days or nights at home? What do you incorporate into yours?