One particular product I wanted to replace and decided to make homemade (if you know me well you know I don't venture into the homemade area very often) was liquid hand soap.
I found a great recipe over at Thank your body blog and decided it was easy enough for a beginner like myself!
So here are the steps to making your own non-toxic hand soap:
1) Purchase a castile 5 oz bar of soap in whatever fragrance you prefer (naturally fragranced!). I chose the Dr. Bronner's classic bar soap. I found mine on sale for $2.99 at the local health food store so I loaded up on them! For this recipe I used "Tea Tree Oil" scent.
2) Depending on how much soap you want you can either cut the bar of soap in half or use whole bar. A whole bar would fill 8 - 16 ounce liquid soap dispenser. A half bar would fill 4 - 16 ounce dispensers.
3) Next you grate the bar of soap, the smaller it is the faster they will melt! (make sure your kids don't come along and try eating it thinking it's grated cheese!!)
4) Bring either 1 gallon/128 ounces of purified water to a boil (if using a whole bar of soap) or 1/2 gallon/64 ounces (if using 1/2 a bar).
5) Once it is boiling, take it off the burner and add the full bar of grated soap, and stir until it's all dissolved. It will have a murky look.
6) Let it sit for 12-24 hours, stirring occasionally! I let mine sit overnight, from 6pm-6am. Then I gave it a stir before going on a run. It was still very liquidy and I thought for sure it hadn't turned out right. But an hour later when I came back from my run and looked again, it had solidified significantly.
7) Pour the soap into all 4-8 liquid soap containers, add any essential oils you'd like, and decorate as you please! I didn't have much to decorate with but took some photo paper and cut to size. Wrote on with sharpie pens, and glued the backs as well as used ducktape to hold on the paper. I also wrote the date in small print on the back so I can remember how long they last.
On the EWG database it rates skin care/cosmetics from 0=no toxins to 10=highest level of toxins. And the household cleaners from A=no toxins to F=highest level of toxins.
The original hand soap that I had purchased from Trader Joe's cost $3.99 per bottle for a total of $17.33 w/tax for 4 of them and $34.66 if I were to purchase 8 bottles . The soap included ingredients/toxins such as fragrance/parfum (which you can not give an accurate rating because there can be up to 600 hidden chemicals in that name alone), cocamidopropyl betaine (rates a 4), cocamide DEA (rates a 7), phenoxyethanol (rates a 4), citral (rates a 7), limonene (rates a 6).
The cost to make 8 soap dispenser was $2.99 (plus tax). I did add some essential oils but already had those so it wasn't any additional cost. That is approximately $0.41 each!
Last week I shared about the new skin care line I am switching too. In case you missed my previous post, Ava Anderson Non-Toxic, you can check that out too! I plan to share more of the things I am replacing as well in the coming weeks!
I hope to encourage others to stop and take the time to read labels, to be educated and informed on harmful toxins, to see how your products rate on the EWG database, and to do what you can to switch out toxic products for better ones. Do it for the health of you and your family! (and remember better for you doesn't always mean you have to pay more...you might be surprised to find you can replace products and save or at least come out even!)
And if you are on Facebook, join me over at A non-toxic lifestyle!
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