Homemade Toothpaste or I Don’t Think We’re Crazy

Mark and I have continued to try homemade cleaning and hygiene products over the last five months.

We tried to make our own dish detergent, which was a disaster. Mark handled the greasy discolored ring that detergent left around the sink every time we did dishes a lot better than I did, but in the end, even he didn’t put up much of a fuss when I sent him on an emergency errand one evening to pick up dish soap.

Then we tried a recipe that Mark’s cousin had put on her blog for a homemade nontoxic drain cleaner. Our bathtub drain perpetually clogged to the point that we were sloshing in water 30 seconds into our showers (embarrassing, I know). Mark followed the soda-and-vinegar recipe dutifully, but it just didn’t do the trick. Still sloshing in our showers.

All that time spent down by the bathtub drain siphoning baking soda down the hole did get Mark to wondering, though, whether the drain itself had a problem. He took the drain apart and found that it did have a problem (technical enough that I won’t try to describe it here). Now the drain works fine, and I guess we have the homemade drain cleaner to thank.

I had had a homemade toothpaste recipe sitting in my binder for a while that I wanted to try. It looked incredibly easy, cheap, and free of all the strange additives found in commercial toothpaste.

We finally got around to making it two or three weeks ago (you can find the recipe in Tsh Oxenreider's book Organized Simplicity).

Sweet minty freshness it was not. I didn’t have peppermint oil on hand, so my first batch just included the coconut oil, baking soda, and stevia powder. The sweet stevia didn’t begin to mask the saltiness of the baking soda.

But when Mark said he didn’t mind it all that much, we continued to use it. When we finished our first tiny batch, we made more, but this time made sure to have peppermint oil on hand. The peppermint flavor definitely helps, but I still maneuver my toothbrush to keep the stuff away from my tongue, and I still shudder as I spit. Ick.

I don’t think we’re crazy, but we’re going to keep using our homemade nasty-tasting toothpaste. As Mark bravely said the first time we made it, it’s really not all that bad, and it’s really only an unwelcome guest in my mouth for about two minutes a day.