The Ultimate Exfoliation: Korean Body Scrubs

Package of Korean scrub mitts

To get smooth skin, people usually exfoliate their skin with body scrubs made of small, scratchy beads, sugar, salt, or ground up fruit seed shells. There is a much more satisfactory way of scrubbing your skin, and that is using the Korean body scrub mitts or scrub towels. They get you smooth and clean, while making your skin pill up into little bits, you can actually see your skin come off!

You can get a Korean scrub done in a Korean spa, a Jjimjilbang, where you would soak in a hot bath and then someone would scrub down your whole body, or you can just buy the scrub mitts that they use and do it yourself!  This way you can go as hard or as gentle as you would like, though you still might need someone else to do your back. You can also reuse the mitt. 

Using a cream body scrub or body polish is sometimes difficult to use. You have to use them when your skin is not too wet, or sometimes even almost dry, otherwise the scrub is diluted and you don't get much exfoliation out of it. Your skin is also softer when wet, and using a cream body scrub when your skin is dry may not smooth your skin, and may just scratch it up. This is the advantage that the Korean scrub mitt has over the cream body scrub. You can use it when your skin is wet, and it also scrubs evenly.

The Korean scrub mitts can be purchased at a Korean market. They are usually pretty cheap. The ones pictured above were from H Mart and were only about $2 for four of them. 

Korean scrub mitt

How to use the Korean scrub mitts:

1. If you have a bathtub, soak in hot water for at least 10 minutes. While soaking, you can also clean your skin with soap. If your bathroom does not have a bathtub and only a shower, you can do your usual shower routine and scrub yourself at the end.

The mitt turned inside out

2. After your skin is sufficiently softened from soaking in water, place the mitts over your hands. You can cover one or both hands with mitts. Some people use the mitts how they are straight out of the package with the tag sticking out, but I like to turn them inside out and then put my hands in. This way the tag isn't hanging out and also the corners and seams won't poke you. The towels are usually made with 100% viscose, and they also usually shrink quite a bit when you put them in water, so you may have to stretch the scrub mitt over your hand.

3. Scrub your body with the mitts! If you scrub over and over in the same spot, you should see your skin start to pill up into rolls of gray skin like in the picture below. It's quite gross but very satisfying, you know you are getting really clean! The mitts are very good for exfoliating your elbows and knees. I always have a hard time scrubbing these with cream body scrubs because the scrub beads usually move away from my pointy elbow or knee, but a scrub mitt doesn't have this problem.

You can see the little rolled up pieces of skin that come off.

Gross and up close.

4. When you are done scrubbing, you can soap yourself again to clean your freshly exposed skin. I usually skip this, I think scrubbing off layers of skin is good enough.

5. Make sure to rinse your scrub mitts of any skin residue, and leave them to try. This will prevent bacteria from growing on them and will help them last longer.

Enjoy having super soft, smooth, glowing skin!