A spa day just for your Girl Scouts sounds delicious…but it can quickly get expensive if you’re not careful.

Recently we hosted a spa day for our older girls in our service unit. The Cadettes earned a retired Council’s Own “Spa-Tacular” interest project patch. They had a terrific afternoon making their own beauty products, doing yoga, talking about managing stress and speaking to a Mary Kay consultant about makeup application.

Getting Started on Your Spa Day

Sure you can buy bunches of hair and skin-care products, but it’s far more fun (and can be cheaper, in some cases) to learn how to make your own.

I found that many of the online resources weren’t optimal for projects our girls could do:

1. inexpensively
2. without a lot of “extra” ingredients mom needed to buy
3. without a lot of kitchen equipment

Basically, I wanted projects the girls could easily replicate at home, if they wished.

I had checked out several DIY beauty product books at our local library, but we really liked the ideas in Botanical beauty : 80 essential recipes for natural spa products best. The book is worth it for ideas for preteens that don’t require a lot of hard-to-find ingredients. Our girls made a honey-chocolate face mask (that I think more than a few of them tried eating as well). We made scented bath salts, a brown-sugar scrub, and a scalp massage oil for stress as well.

Other ideas were tried-and-true favorites that we have done with our troop in the past. They still love the Yoga 4 Kids game that they insisted on playing at every troop meeting the year we did the Get Moving journey as Juniors.

Saving Dollars on Spa Products

Two things made a big difference in the event costs.

First, watching what we spent on ingredients had a significant impact. Even with handmade products, there were several recipes we had to abandon because of the ingredient cost. We opted to cut costs by buying what you might consider lower-quality ingredients (you don’t need “extra virgin” olive oil if you aren’t eating it, and generic ingredients from Aldi work as well as name brand). Also, we made items in smaller sizes than if we had used it at home. We felt the purpose of this was to try to make and test several different products vs. make a lot of one item, so we packaged in small containers we got at the dollar store.

We also reached into my garden for dill for the nail soak and for cucumbers for the girls’ eyes.

Second, reach out to see who you know. We were able to add a scalp massage oil at the last minute because we received donations of empty essential oil bottles (which we boiled and cleaned) first. We used extra olive oil with lavender essential oil for a quick and easy scalp massage oil.

We also had the Mary Kay demonstration and discussion about makeup because of a connection I knew at church. She was more than willing to share samples and her time with us.

Spa day doesn’t have to just be about doing nails and hair. Have a little fun, get out of your comfort zone, and cook up an adventure!

Want more spa ideas? Check out what we did for our back-to-school spa party as Juniors.

Note: This post does include affiliate links, which helps support our scouting adventures and this blog.