The stuff you do in the bathroom, including showering, brushing your teeth, putting on your makeup, washing your face can lead to putting an enormous amount of poison into your body each and everyday -- sometimes twice or more per day. To combat this, I'm trying to make small changes here and there to lessen my toxic load. In doing so, I consulted the Environmental Working Group's Skin Deep Cosmetics Database to check some of the products I use. And, well, I was somewhat shocked. What I thought was a more "natural" body wash, turned out to be just average for the money I was spending and had more bad things in it that I thought. I should have known better, but we all get fooled once in a while.
And so I began a search for a cleaner product. And by the magic of Pinterest, I found what I was looking for!
I only needed three things: a "clean" bar of soap, vegetable glycerine and an essential oil (optional). I headed to Rainbow Natural Foods to find my loot and found it!
This soap, Kiss My Face's Pure Olive Oil Soap, gets a "0" from the Skin Deep database, because it's just that, pure olive oil. I also picked up some pure vegetable glycerine and some pure, organic tea tree oil.
The instructions are pretty simple: grate the soap, which made four cups of soap, and put it in 16 cups of water, over a low to medium heat and stir until all the soap melts. Add 4 tablespoons of the glycerine and at the end 20-30 drops of the essential oil.
This gave me four litres of body wash. I washed out my old body wash bottle to use in the shower and the rest got poured into large 1-litre mason jars (the colour is that green/yellow because again I used olive oil soap and therefore it's the colour of olive oil!)
Easy-peasy! And the verdict? It's a very different soap, but that's mostly because of my choice to use an oil-based soap. It's more liquid than a cream or a gel and like all soaps without sulfates, it won't lather that much. But that doesn't mean it doesn't feel lovely on my skin and makes me squeeky-clean.
So now the cost... well the soap was about $4, the vegetable glycerine was about $6 and the oil was $11. I used all the soap, half the glycerine and not much of the oil. I used to pay $10/litre. This one cost me about $9+tax for 4 litres. Yup, that's a bargain!
That is really incredible. I totally admire this kind of a project. So you're pretty satisfied with your soap? We are both trying to limit our toxic cosmetics (mostly following David Suzuki's "Dirty Dozen" of bad chemicals), but this sounds even better!
ReplyDeleteI do like it! It's quite liquid but works fine in a loofah. It doesn't feel super moisturizing when you're in the shower, but my skin is super hydrated - it is olive oil after all. It's a little adjustment, but just that little. If you use a different soap you likely get different results.
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