A Busy Sunday: Some Natural Cleaning and Beauty Products

The fit of energy I experienced Sunday afternoon may have come from speed-reading through The Hunger Games between Friday and Sunday in preparation for going to see the movie this coming weekend with some friends. (May the odds be ever in your favor!) Whatever the cause, the effect was interesting.

Let me back up. We let ourselves run out of commercial dish soap earlier this week, in preparation for trying to make our own. I did make my own. I may not have done it right. I’m not sure. Either way, the resulting dish soap is weak and leaves a thick greasy smear around the bowl of the sink after I drain the water. I find myself wanting a commercial dish soap just to clean off the grease ring.

So, I finished The Hunger Games yesterday afternoon. My thought process after putting the book down was as follows:

Hmm. Husband has been picking up our empty hand soap dispenser periodically this week and wiggling it, while looking at me expectantly. I guess it’s time to try that new hand soap recipe I found online.  Oh, yeah, I wanted to try to make hair gel again, since it still bugs me that I couldn’t get that recipe to work the last two times. Ah! Here’s the shea butter my lovely sister-in-law brought me last weekend! I’m going to make lotion. If I don’t do it today, it probably won’t happen until next weekend. That reminds me: my hair is dry, and sometime I want to try a hot oil treatment on my hair. Oh, look! I happen to have a recipe on my computer for a hot oil treatment for hair! I’ll do that today too!

I proceeded to make all of those products mentioned above. And then I gave my hair a hot oil treatment, humming ‘Go, Grease Lightning’ all the while. This frenzied activity resulted in a veritable mountain of greasy dishes by the sink (and soft, shiny hair).

I looked at the mountain of dishes. And then I whipped my head to the left to stare at the bottle of weak watery homemade dish soap.

I called Husband. And asked him to pick up a bottle of real dish soap on his way home from work.

Recipes Used

If you’re at all curious to check out any of the recipes I used yesterday, here is a list of them, complete with their status in my home right now and link to where I found them:

Homemade Dish Soap

Check it out here.

Weak. Very weak. But the blogger who posted the recipe sings its praises so much I think I’ve just got to try it again. I want it to work.

Homemade Hand Soap

You can find it here.

So far this is still sitting on my stove. The first recipe I tried said to use 4 oz. of grated soap to four cups of water. Basically that made a gel like overcooked tapioca pudding. I’ve reheated it and added water, oh, three or four times. Now the soap is diluted with almost a gallon of water, which makes my concoction about the same as this recipe.

Homemade Hair Gel

I’ve seen it enough places that I’m not sure who to cite for it. I added ½ t. of plain gelatin to one cup of boiling water. Then I let it sit overnight. I forgot about it this morning, but I’ll try it tomorrow to see if it worked. (Just as an aside, I’ve read that you do have to keep this hair gel refrigerated.)

Homemade Lotion

I’m not sure where Sister-in-law got this recipe from. This is exactly what she sent me:

"The lotion is 1 1/2 c. pure shea butter, 1/2c. coconut oil and 1-2 oz. jojoba oil. Melt shea butter over stove on low, once melted add other two (coconut oil will be a solid but will melt very quickly). take off heat and start whipping with a mixer. Mix for a few minutes then put in freezer for a few minutes, keep repeating until you want to quit and buy lotion instead! Eventually (usually 20-30 minutes later) the liquid will almost instantly turn into a nice whipped butter texture. Once it feels like a whipped body butter it is done."

 The lotion is whipped and creamy, and I love the feel of it! I added essential sweet orange oil to mine, and next time I will add more. The lotion still smells kind of like shea butter, which isn’t my favorite smell. If you make this yourself, don’t expect it to act exactly like store-bought lotion. It leaves your skin looking kind of greasy at first, but it will absorb in.

Homemade Hot Oil Treatment

Basically just ½ c. of olive oil heated up on the stove until warm, then applied to hair. I’ve read that you can also add ½ c. rosemary leaves to the oil and then strain them out before applying to hair. I don’t really want to spend that much money on my hair.

Right now my hair is about an inch above my shoulders and it’s naturally pretty thick. The half cup of oil was a little more than I needed. Next time I will probably just heat up a third of a cup of oil.