I am now the proud owner of a coffee machine (early wedding gift) and attempted to make my first cup last night. I thought it would be easy, but it turns out there are many opportunities to make mistakes — and we made them all. It took my fiancé and I about 6 tries to get it right — that’s a whole lotta wasted beans!

The first time I opened up the filter to dump the leftover grinds, I felt too wasteful to do it. There had to be some way to use them, right? Well, 10 years as a beauty editor weren’t spent in vain, because I immediately thought of the perfect way to recycle them: Make a coffee body scrub.

Coffee grinds are soft enough to gently exfoliate your face and body. Caffeine is also thought to help reduce cellulite, specifically by helping your body metabolize fat, and reducing swelling.

Here’s the easy way to do it: Dump the extra grinds into a bowl, and add a small amount of milk to make the mixture creamy. If you like a clean-rinsing formula, leave it at that. If you want more intense pampering, add a little olive oil or honey. I already had a plastic drain cover in my shower, so I knew that would catch the grinds — if you don’t have one, I recommend you get one before trying this, as you don’t want to risk any plumbing issues.

Then, just scoop out a bit with your hands and scrub in a circular motion. My coffee-and-skim-milk scrub left my body so soft that I used it on my face, too — just be extra gentle (as always) until you see how your skin reacts. For easy clean-up, grab the shower head and rotate it around the perimeter of the tub at any grinds that accumulated there, and they’ll quickly wash right down into the drain catcher. Then simply dump that when you’re done, and enjoy your soft skin.

You can even make these in advance and store them in mason jars. Let us know if you have your own body scrub recipe (because we know many of you clever girls do!) and we’ll feature it in an upcoming post here. Email daily@spaweekmedia.com.