Passionate Homemaking

Living simply in order to give generously

Natural Body Products on A Budget - Part 2

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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 borax (this excel­lent clean­ing prod­uct works as hand soap too!) to an ½ inch depth (1/4 cup borax per pint of water). Add water. Shake well and allow to settle. Pour the water into a pumped bottle leav­ing the borax powder behind. UPDATE: As there seems to be some con­flict­ing reports on the use of borax on the skin, please use your own dis­cern­ment in using this recipe.
Sham­poo - Baking Soda & water (UPDATE: 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.

Here is another sham­poo recipe using apple cider vine­gar. 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 (UPDATE: 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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13 Responses to “Natural Body Products on A Budget - Part 2”

  1. Stacy Says:

    These are great ideas!

    Thanks so much for shar­ing. I am always look­ing for new ideas in this area.

    Stacy

    [Reply]

  2. Amy Best Says:

    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.

    [Reply]

    Lindsay replied on January 4th, 2008:

    I was refer­ring to hand soap, like that which you would have by your bath­room sinks. Thanks for clar­i­fy­ing.

    [Reply]

  3. Kathleen Says:

    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?

    [Reply]

    Lindsay replied on January 4th, 2008:

    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.

    [Reply]

  4. Mrs. Taft Says:

    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.

    [Reply]

  5. Mrs. Taft Says:

    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.​cos​met​ics​data​base.​com/​i​n​g​r​e​d​i​e​n​t​.​p​h​p​?​i​n​g​r​e​d​0​6​=​7​0​5​9​9​6​&​a​m​p​;​n​o​t​h​a​nks=1

    [Reply]

  6. Tammy L Says:

    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. ;)

    [Reply]

  7. CC's Momma Says:

    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.

    [Reply]

  8. Missy Says:

    What do you use for baby soap?

    thanks!

    [Reply]

    Lindsay replied on January 14th, 2008:

    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!

    [Reply]

  9. Megan Says:

    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!

    [Reply]

  10. Stacy Says:

    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

    [Reply]

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