Sugar is one of nature’s best sweet treats, but did you know that you can use sugar for other purposes besides sweetening foods and beverages? If you’re trying to keep sugar out of your diet because of health or fitness reasons, you can still keep some in your home to use it in other practical ways.
Here are some different ways that you can use sugar to enhance your life.
Facial Scrub
Sugar can be used as a facial scrub to exfoliate your skin. The coarse crystal sugars can remove dead skin cells, dirt and other debris when rubbed over your face. A sugar facial scrub may even help reduce the appearance of fine lines and wrinkles. If you struggle with acne, scrubbing blemishes and blackheads with sugar can help clear up these problem areas. However, it’s important to be aware of any excessive dryness or irritation that a sugar facial scrub could cause and cease using it if you notice any scratches or wounds on your skin.
Wound Healing
Even though sugar can cause some minor skin wounds if it’s rubbed across the skin too harshly, it can actually be effective in treating wounds if applied correctly. Sugar works as an excellent antibacterial agent by drawing the moisture from a wound that’s required for bacteria to survive. Reducing the bacteria in the wound area can help prevent infection. Simply sprinkling some sugar over an open cut so that it covers the wound completely can elicit faster healing. Make sure that the wound has stopped bleeding before applying the sugar to avoid increasing the bleeding.
Pesticide
Sugar can be used as a pesticide to kill some of the bugs that invade your home or garden. By combining equal parts sugar, water and borax, you can make a pesticide that’s powerful enough to kill ants. Cockroaches can be eliminated with a homemade pesticide that’s made from equal parts sugar and baking soda. Worms can be controlled in your garden by sprinkling 2.25 kilograms of sugar for every 250 feet of garden space. It’s even possible to make your own fly strips by mixing equal parts sugar, honey and water and heating the concoction before dipping strips of brown packaging tape into the mixture and hanging them with string around your home to attract flies.
Degreaser
Trying to remove grease from your kitchen or garage can be difficult even with the best store-bought cleaners. To make the task of removing grease easier, try mixing some sugar with any type of liquid hand soap. The coarse properties of the sugar crystals combined with the soap can scrub away grease much easier.
Stain Remover
Tough stains in clothes can be removed much easier by pretreating the stains with a homemade sugar concoction before placing the clothes into a washing machine. The concoction can be made by mixing together a paste that includes sugar, water and white vinegar. After letting the paste sit for 10 to 20 minutes, you can apply it to a stain before washing the garment in cold water. If you notice that the stain is still visible after washing, the garment should be treated again and rewashed to avoid baking the stain into the fabric permanently in the dryer.
Cut Flower Preserver
If you enjoy using cut flowers to decorate tabletops and other areas of your home, you can make them last longer with sugar. You can combine three teaspoons of sugar with two tablespoons of vinegar for every quart of warm water that you use for your flowers. The mixture can then be placed into vases before putting cut flowers into them. It’s important to replace the mixture daily in all your vases. The sugar in the mixture will help supply nourishment to the flower stems while the vinegar reduces bacterial growth.
Uneven Self-Tanner Fixer
If you ever make the mistake of applying self-tanner unevenly, you can fix the blotches and other signs of self-tanner unevenness on your skin with a concoction that’s made with one teaspoon of sugar with ¼ cup of coconut oil. The concoction should then be scrubbed on the skin to correct the unevenness. The sugar in the concoction will buff out the places where excess tanner was applied while the coconut oil will help moisturize and nourish the skin.
Coffee Grinder Cleaner
Sugar can make the job of cleaning a coffee grinder much easier if you like to grind your own coffee beans. Simply pour some sugar into the grinder in the same way that you would coffee beans and grind the sugar for a few minutes before emptying it. In addition to making your coffee grinder cleaner, sugar can absorb residue smells to eliminate any lingering odors.
Hair Removal
Any unwanted hair on your legs, arms or other parts of your body can be removed with a sugar-based hair remover. You can make this remover by mixing two cups of cane sugar with ¼ cup of water and ¼ cup of lemon juice in a pan and heating the pan on a stove so that the concoction boils. Once you’ve let the mixture boil for a few minutes, let it cool before applying it to wax strips that will be placed over the unwanted body hair and pulled to remove it.
Food Preserver
You can make certain foods last longer with sugar. Sugar has long been used as a food preservative because of its ability to absorb moisture and reduce bacterial growth. By placing a few sugar cubes into an air-tight container that you use to store bread, a cake or some other baked item, you can prolong the food’s shelf life. Sugar cubes can also be placed into air-tight containers to preserve cheese.
Comments
0 comments