Earlier this week I set myself a challenge: make three homemade beauty treatments for under £5 (I’m allowed to use a few things from the cupboard) and in under 30 minutes, from mixing to rinsing.

I have completed my challenge, and although I’m not certain I’m all that much more naturally beautiful now it’s done, I did enjoy the process (most of it) and I do have a few tips to pass on to any other natural beauties in need of a radiance top-up…

Step one: preparation

The ingredients for natural beauty?

I made the face masque first. My morale suffered a setback when I cut the avocado open to find that lame, stringy avocado flesh you sometimes get when the fruit has just gone past its peak. Annoying. This reminds me of the eat it/wear it edict and whilst I would not normally eat stringy avocado, I do in principle eat avocados and so I press on, mixing in the egg yolk and setting the masque aside.

Next up was lemon rind for the body scrub. This task was a bit labour-intensive, but the cheery smell helped me get past my avocado disappointment.

The scrub looked really runny once I got the lemon and sugar in with the olive oil so I added another cup of brown sugar, bringing it to the consistency of slightly runny yoghurt. Acceptable.

The scrub: olive oil, brown sugar and lemon rind

The final product, and the one that would prove to be the most problematic in its application, was the hair treatment. I mashed the second half of the substandard avocado into the smoothest paste I could muster, and then added half a cup of coconut milk. It smelled delicious!

Step two: application

I applied the hair treatment whilst leaning over the tub – a wise move. I have long hair, so I concentrated on the ends rather than the roots, but I soon ran low on coconut-avocado mixture and so extended my supply by adding more coconut milk.

The procedure was messy in the extreme but most pleasing in an olfactory sense. Once my mane was soaked I wrung it out as best I could, then wrapped my head in a carrier bag and prayed no-one would knock on my door in the next twenty minutes.

The face masque was next, and I have to confess I was a bit disappointed in the (stringy) avocados. Had I used a blender I think I would have a got a better result. As it was, I found myself slapping bits of gluey green shrapnel to my face and moving in one-quarter time in an effort not to jostle them off.

Word to the wise: beauty takes time, patience, and a blender.

About fifteen minutes after I applied these first two treatments – fifteen minutes in which I moved very slowly but still shed dribbles of coconut milk and avocado micro-chunks – I began preparations for the third treatment, the scrub.

It’s common sense to apply a body scrub in the shower, so timing-wise I was able to make up a bit of ground by rinsing the first two treatments at roughly the same time as I applied the scrub.

Step three: rinse, rinse, rinse

First, the face. I hopped into the shower, flipped the tap to ‘tepid’ (as suggested by the California Avocado Commission, providers of my recipe) and rinsed off my green masque. Heaven.

Next was the hair rinse, a seriously involved business that took a good few minutes. The recipe comes with a caution to shampoo afterwards. This is not a step to miss. In fact, I recommend conditioning after shampooing as this is the best way to be sure you’ve truly evicted any rogue bits of avocado still resident in your tresses.

Finally, the scrub – without a doubt, my favourite treatment. It smelled sweet and lemony and was no problem to apply. What’s more, I could feel my hands getting softer as I scrubbed away… a very good sign indeed.

The scrub didn’t rinse clean off – it left a bit of an olive oil residue – but I didn’t mind this as I think the oil is the moisturising part of the treatment. If you were doing this treatment just before putting on any clothing that would pick up this oil, I would recommend following the scrub with a soap chaser.

The verdict

I am rather humbled to say that each of these treatments worked rather nicely, indeed.

Face: my skin feels smooth and a bit tighter than usual. I spent a narcissistic minute and a half examining my face in the mirror and the verdict is that whilst my fine lines are still there (admission: I kind of hoped I might find a miracle anti-ageing cure in my masque), I look rather awake and rested – which, in fact, I am not. Success.

Hair: my hair is shiny (shinier than yesterday? I don’t know) and soft (ditto). The ends feel slightly less strawlike than they did yesterday, but the improvement is far less pronounced than it is when I use a product like Kerastase deep conditioner. At just about ten times the price, this is to be expected… but still, I wanted a little more from the conditioning treatment. Moderate success.

Skin: the big winner. My skin is ridiculously smooth! I cannot get over how effective the brown sugar and olive oil combination was. I would do this again in a heartbeat – it was cheap, easy to make and apply, smelled lovely and worked a treat. Astounding success.

And the challenge as a whole? About 80% successful. My ingredients came in just over budget at £5.13, and the project took a little longer than I thought it would – about 40 minutes in all. Still, I found one real winner of a beauty treatment that I would happily do again, and two more I would like to refine for future spa days.

If I compare my savings to what I might have spent on a face masque, deep conditioner and body scrub…

Spent: £5.13

Saved: about £10

Technical note: I apologise for the lack of photos in this post. I suffered a camera-related setback about midway through my beautifying.