How to Do a Pedicure at Home with Natural Ingredients

12/17/2015
by James Adcock

While a professional will pamper your feet and allow you to relax, you can do a pedicure at home. You don’t even need to purchase expensive foot creams and scrubs. Here’s what you can do.

spa chair

Gather the Ingredients

Before you start thinking of a pedicure, you need the necessary tools to achieve it. If you have never done this at home before, you might need to purchase some essentials. Here’s a list of what you might need:

  • A small tub or a basin
  • Towels
  • Bath salts
  • Pumice stone
  • Foot cream
  • Nail polish remover
  • Cotton balls
  • Nail trimmer
  • Nail file
  • Base coat
  • Top coat
  • Nail polish

This might seem like an intimidating list, but you might find that you already have most of these in your home. What you don’t, you will need to purchase. If you want a true salon experience, you can purchase pedicure chairs too.

Wash
Wash your feet thoroughly before starting your pedicure. You can use a glycerin soap to soften the heels here.

Prepare a Soak
The first thing to do is to soak your feet in warm water. There are several homemade soak recopies available online. One of the easiest is the honey and lemon mixture. All you need to do is add a cup of honey, 1 tablespoon of vinegar (specifically apple cider vinegar), and a sliced lemon in a bowl of hot water, before soaking your feet in it.

Honey will moisturize and disinfect, lemon will remove orders, while vinegar will remove germs and dirt, cleaning your feet thoroughly.

Scrub
After you’ve soaked your feet in the hot water for a while, you should address dead skin and calluses that easily build up on your feet. One of the best ways to do this is to use the pumice stone to gently scrub away at the heels. Once you have done that, use a homemade scrub to remove dead skin cells from your legs and feet.

Again, there are several recipes of foot scrubs available online. You can try a coconut and salt scrub. This is easy to put together. Add about 1 cup of oil to 2 cups of coarse sea salt or sugar. You can also add vitamin E, but that’s not necessary. Gently rub this mixture on your legs and feet in circular motions. Once you’re done, clean your legs and feet and start working on the nails.

Trimming and Filing
Your nails would be softened by the soak and exposure to water. This is the best time to trim and shape them. Carefully trim them with nail clippers, not cutting too close to the flesh. Don’t dry to cut in a curved form as it’ll only encourage ingrown nails.

After clipping, file the nails gently. Hold your file in a 45° angle and file in one direction. You shouldn’t move your file back and forth as it’ll just damage the nails. At this stage, you can push the cuticle back with a tool and remove hangnails and ingrown nails.

Moisturizing
After taking care of the nails, you should moisturize. You shouldn’t allow the skin on your feet to remain dry for long. The salt from the scrub would’ve taken away a bit of the natural moisture of your skin. You can use any intense moisturizer here or create one from scratch.

We find the coconut oil moisturizer to be very effective. You need to mix about ¾ cups of coconut oil with a ½ cup of shea butter, and about 10 drops of lavender essential oils. Coconut oil is a very intense moisturizer.

All that remains now is to paint your toenails. You should apply a basecoat and allow it to dry before applying a color. Once the color is dry, apply a clear topcoat and your home pedicure is done.

If you have any questions about nail salon furniture or want to know more about pedicure products, you’re free to contact us at Pedi Source. Just give us a call at 1855 429 PEDI. You can also email one of these two email address with your questions and contact details: info@Pedisource.com and James@Pedisource.com.