Detoxing our Hand Wash/Body Wash/Face Wash

Several years ago now we made the switch to buying this castile soap through our co-op....

You can find it at larger grocery store chains and health food stores also,
but I love the wholesale prices we get through our co-op

...and using it to wash....well, everything!

Well, not exactly everything...but pretty close.  

Using the information I learned here on My Blessed Home (love this site, btw)...I went out and bought (quite a few) regular foaming hand wash pumps at Wally.  We used up that soap, and then...

Our favorite scents are Almond, Peppermint and Baby-Mild.

We started making our own hand wash to have at each of the bathroom sinks.  

And we have them in our showers to use as body wash.

And, I have absolutely been known to use this to wash my face at night (although I need to do another post about what I really love to use to cleanse my face at night).  

Some people even use this as shampoo.  We tried it a few times.  It actually worked fine on the boys...but I didn't care for the results on any of us girls.  (I also need to finish the post on how we've detoxed our shampoo.)




I love the way this is healthier for my family (vegetable-based, using natural oils and fragrances) and it is cheaper.  Love that word "cheaper."  I can get a 32 oz. bottle of this soap for about $9 or $10 (depending on if it's on sale that month or not) and that will last us for months and months.  



So here is the very technical process for making this foaming hand soap/body wash/face wash:



Grab a helpful cutie.

Fill an empty foam dispenser almost to the top with water.

Then squirt a teaspoon or two of castile soap in the bottle.


Done.



Now that wasn't so hard, was it Elisabeth?

She said, "no."

You can add food coloring to the bottles if you like, although that kind of defeats part of the purpose of detoxing the soap.  But hey, I'm nothing if not a flexible and super-cool mama (ahem), so I did let my kids do that at first...and we ended up with some very interesting colors of hand soap.  After a time or two, they got tired of it, thankfully, and we've had white and non-toxic soap ever since.

In my pre-Trying to Live and Eat Healthy Era, I loved to have yummy smelling soap at the sinks.  Something from Bath and Bodyworks?  Oh, yes, please!  But now it is more important to me to make sure that we have something non-toxic to wash our hands and bodies with.  Besides, I love the way the scented castile soaps smell...especially the Almond.

(Insert a "Submissive Wife" moment here:  Jas just really prefers to use a bar soap in the shower, so I now keep a bar of Dr. Bronner's Peppermint castile soap in our shower, instead of a pump for body wash.  It is actually a very nice way to get woken up in the morning with that yummy pepperminty smell!  If this is the most difficult thing I ever have to submit on...I'll be doing pretty good.)

If the soap dispenser hasn't been used in a while, the castile soap will lay on the bottom of the bottle.  No big deal, I just give the bottle a little shake before I pump it to make sure the soap is mixed throughout the bottle.


Easy.  Cheap.  Non-toxic (when you don't add the dye).

Check. Check. Check.