Natural Body Products on A Budget – Part 2
natural body products, natural living on a budget Add comments
Visit here for part 1 of this post.
Here are a few more additional recipes for all natural body products! Enjoy!
Liquid Soap – Fill your empty soap dispensers with Dr. Bronners liquid castile soap. It is rather thin on its own so dilution is not recommended.
Shampoo – Baking Soda & water (approximately 1 Tbls soda to 1 cup water)-make use of your old dispensers! Combine these two ingredients for an excellent shampoo. I make a paste with baking soda and water, massage this into my scalp and rinse well. It definitely does not have the soapy feel of your regular shampoo, but it actually feels like it is cleaning your scalp more thoroughly. This is called the no-poo method.
Here is another shampoo recipe using apple cider vinegar. ACV works effectively as a conditioning agent. This substance must be refrigerated between uses.
Add the following ingredients in a blender:
1 oz. Olive oil
1 egg
1 Tablespoon lemon juice
1 teaspoon ACV.
Use as you would a regular shampoo
Conditioner - Apple Cider Vinegar (Approximately 1-2 Tbls. cider to 1 cup water) – Spray this solution to the ends of your hair and again rinse well. Cleans and detangles. Makes hair feel very soft. I do not recommend using an old cleaning spray bottle (I washed it in the dishwasher too!). I did this at first and it added a horrible smell (probably not good for the hair, either). Use a small spray bottle. The smell takes a little getting used too, and I increased the water quantity to decrease the scent. It would be worth trying to add an essential oil of some kind to overcome the ACV smell.
Apple Cider Vinegar has not only proved beneficial to take internally but also offer as many topical health benefits too. When you incorporate apple cider vinegar into your body-care regimen, you will quickly find that you don’t need many of the commercial beauty aids. Many of which contain preservatives, and synthetic perfumes. Apple cider vinegar (ACV), on the other hand, is an all-natural remedy that helps the skin/scalp Ph balance. Healthy skin has a protective acid mantle that can be stripped away by overuse of alkaline body soaps. The skin is the largest organ of elimination; so maintaining an acid mantle assists the normal detoxification process.
For refreshing and deep cleansing face wash
Add 1 c. of ACV to basin of warm water to use as a refreshing face wash. For a steam deep cleanse, add 3 tablespoons of ACV to a pan of boiled water and lean your face over it. Cover your head with a towel for five minutes, allowing the steam to open up the pores and loosen any impurities from the skin’s surface.
Hope that helps with a few ideas for natural body products! Any other ideas?
I just came across this website that has many more wonderful body product recipes. Some are similar to what I have tried above. Check it out!
Here is another site a reader sent me on going shampoo free. Very interesting information! Thanks Jerilyn!
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These are great ideas!
Thanks so much for sharing. I am always looking for new ideas in this area.
Stacy
Thanks for all these! When you say “liquid soap” (the first recipe), do you mean hand soap? Or body soap? I’m just wondering what you use that for.
I was referring to hand soap, like that which you would have by your bathroom sinks. Thanks for clarifying.
Lindsay,
This is a super series! Thank you!
Does the baking soda shampoo really work on oily hair? It sounds like more of a exfoliant…but if it really removes the oil and dirt, I want to try it! And borax is okay straight on the skin?
My hair is not really oily, so I couldn’t say personally. I think you will just have to give it a try. I have heard from others that it works for them. As far as borax goes,I have never heard it being harmful for the skin. I made a slight change in the recipe above. You are only using a small amount anyway and leaving the borax powder behind.
I am not sure my other comment posted, but basically, you may want to do some research about using borax as a skin product, it seems to generally not be considered safe or sufficient for skin care. It’s not safe for pregnant or nursing women to use, as it is toxic for unborn babies, and it is also toxic to small children and can cause anemia in them. It must not be ingested, and it may be absorbed into the skin which isn’t good as it has been linked overseas to cancer and is phased out in a lot of things or even banned overseas for that reason. It also will dry out and brittle the skin over time. Also, it’s an emulsifier, which simply allows the oils on your skin to mix with the water around it, rather than a true germ remover like the saponified properties in soap (which is why it works great in the laundry but dries out your skin). Any skin application of boric acid must be washed off.
Yeah that’s weird, that comment posted fine but not the other one. The other had html and links in it, which may be why. I had a bunch of links for you, but if you type in “is borax safe to use on skin?” you’ll find a plethora of good information such as this:
http://www.cosmeticsdatabase.com/ingredient.php?ingred06=705996¬hanks=1
Thanks for sharing a link to this post! Someday I will try the baking soda shampoo… maybe when I get my hair cut next… I’ll be braver about trying something new.
good posts. I have been using some of these ideas for a while now. I think I’m going to try to implement a few more though.
What do you use for baby soap?
thanks!
Check out my Natural Body Products on A Budget – part 1. I discuss using Dr. Bronner’s Baby Mild soap for all our needs. I use this for our baby as well!
Lindsay, Just wanted to let you know that I bit the bullet this morning and decided to try the “shampoo-less” method with baking soda and vinegar instead. At first I didn’t “feel” or think the baking soda was working, but after a few minutes, I could definitely tell something was happening! I didn’t have any ACV, so I used regular white vinegar instead and it did fine. My hair has a very faint scent of vinegar to it, but it’s nothing anyone would know about but me. I was pleasantly surprised to see how soft and voluminous my hair is now, with no product in it! Score! Thanks for your help!
Hi Lindsay,
I was just looking around your blog for skin care ideas…I have made the deodorant and like it quite well.
May I ask if you use make up? If so, what kind. I am also wondering what you might use as a daily facial moisturizer. I am trying to be careful about what I put on my skin on a regular basis.
Hope you are having a good day.
Thanks for all the hard work you put into this blog.
~Stacy
Dear Lindsey,
I love your website. I’d like to weigh in on the borax discussion: Borax toxicity is dose dependent, but we must remember that infants, small children and pets will be adversely affected at low concentrations.
I recently ushered my four year old to the ER after finding him mixing and drinking concoctions from the bathroom supplies (including liquid soap). He was fine, but we learned a few lessons about child behavior: First, tasting awful will not keep a child from drinking something; Second, children go through phases and previous adversions or adherence to motherly directives will not predict future behaviors; and third, watching me mix up household products in the kitchen possibly inspired his newfound fascination with bathroom “bartending.” So- how toxic is not always as important as how it will be “used.”
For what it is worth, I find I can stretch out liquid soap (nearly any kind) for hand washing by reusing a foaming soap bottle and diluting the less expensive regular liquid soap by as much as 50%. I also keep a jar of sugar & cooking oil for scrubbing my hands after gardening.
Greetings to you AndiFrank, my your little one is active. Not to worry. Did you think of giving him his own mixing bowl and set him up like yours? He will go to his own and leave yours alone. Just keep him supplied with fake ingredients and he will love it and you will not have to worry about him ingesting anything harmful. Look for substitute ingredients on line under just that Substitute soap, etc. Okay? Hope that helps.
Just wondering what type of spray bottles you use for your vinegar based conditioner and cleaners? I seem to be going through bottles like crazy! It seems that the vinegar must be doing something to the spray mechanism, as after a month or so the sprayer will stop working. It gets to the point that I can’t srapy at all. Have you had that problem?
Thanks for sharing your wisdom- God bless you,
Michelle
I have had this exact same problem! I had two identical spray bottles, one for my shampoo and the other for my vinegar rinse. The shampoo bottle is fine, but the one with the vinegar has stopped working completely!
Do you know of a good facial exfoliating cleanser? Exfoliating 1-2x/week helps me not break out. Thanks!
I’ve used baking soda for an exfoliater and it worked well. I also have found that’s the only way to keep me from breaking out. Microfiber also works.
do you also use the homemade shampoo and conditioner on your children? i am trying to find a kid friendly homemade shampoo and conditioner that wont hurt them. thanks
Just a quick note on using Dr. Bronner’s castille soap – my Mom got me some AWESOME new Cuisipro soap dispensers for our bathrooms, and they turn soap into foam. You put your soap of choice into the dispenser up to the first line (very low on the bottle) and then fill the rest of the way with water. I use them with Dr. Bronner’s, and the foam comes out smelling just as strong as straight soap, but using like 90% less! Makes it a lot easier to pay for castille soap!!
re: using Dr. Bronners in the hand soap dispensers.
Since the consistency is so runny, it is perfect to use in foam soap dispensers. I bought five foam soaps for $1 each and dumped out the soap that came with it. Then I put a big squirt of Dr. Bronners (I like peppermint) and the rest water (about 1/4 soap to 3/4 water). It works really well and since it is so diluted, it is SUPER frugal for liquid soap at all the sinks in the house. I think the runny, watery consistency of Dr. Bronners would shoot out of a regular soap dispenser and make a mess.
sorry, I just read the last comment and saw that I wasn’t the first one to come up with this idea =) Anyway, this method is probably cheaper than the name brand dispensers. Also, I peeled off the sticker label, so it looks a bit better at the sink, but it’s still plastic. I’d love to find a classy stainless steel or ceramic foam soap dispenser.