St Ives Apricot Scrub is probably the first face scrub most people ever used. Cheap, familiar, sitting in every drugstore and every share-house bathroom. If you grew up anywhere near a chemist, you know the tube.
But check the ingredient list, and the thing doing the actual exfoliating isn't apricot. It's walnut shell powder.
What's Actually In It
Apricot Fruit Extract sits near the bottom of St Ives' ingredient list. A minor conditioning ingredient. The scent, basically. The exfoliant that does the physical work is Juglans Regia, walnut shell powder, ground down and mixed through the formula.
Walnut shell doesn't break down into smooth, rounded particles the way rice powder or finely milled salt does. It fractures into jagged, irregular pieces. Dermatologists have raised this for years, and it was significant enough that St Ives faced a class action lawsuit in 2016 over claims the scrub's walnut shell particles caused micro-tears in skin.
The formula also carries a sulfate-type surfactant (Sodium Lauryl Sulfoacetate), synthetic fragrance, and Titanium Dioxide. St Ives markets the scrub as "100% natural exfoliants," but the brand's own retailer copy lists it as "92% naturally derived, including water."
What It Isn't Built For
None of that makes St Ives a bad drugstore scrub for what it is. But it isn't formulated for anything surf-specific. There's no mechanism in it for dissolving zinc or sunscreen, because it was never built to.
Zinc and sunscreen are oil-based. They bond to skin and resist water. Removing them properly needs an oil to dissolve that bond first, before any exfoliant goes to work. St Ives skips that step entirely because it was never designed for a surfer's specific buildup.
What a Face Scrub for Surfers Actually Needs
A proper face scrub for surfers does two things in order. Dissolve first, exfoliate second. Coconut and jojoba oil break down the oily bond zinc and sunscreen form with skin. Only then does a naturally derived exfoliant, something rounded and gentle rather than jagged, lift it away.
That's the difference between a scrub built for general use and one built for what actually accumulates on a surfer's skin.
Surfocco's Apricot & Rice
Our Apricot & Rice Face Scrub uses real apricot seed and rice, not walnut shell, as the physical exfoliant, paired with coconut and jojoba oil to dissolve zinc, sunscreen and daily buildup first. Formulated for surfers' skin. Made in Bali.
Surf. Salt. Skin.
Shop the Surfocco face and body scrubs at surfocco.com.
