Budget Stretching Ideas - Personal Care Products (continued)

This is the second post on budget stretching ideas for clean/healthy personal care products. I want to take the opportunity to point out that while you can find inexpensive commercial products that save you money, these may cost you in the long run by exposing you to toxic ingredients. In our experience, personal care products that are not laden with toxic ingredients tend to cost more. Perhaps your body can handle the more toxic ingredients. With the health issues in our family, we avoid them as much as possible. Thus, we will focus on budget stretching ideas for healthy personal care options.

This post could also be called DIY Personal Care Products or Homemade Personal Care Products since it is usually less expensive to make your own products. The last post covered mouthwash, toothpaste, lotion, and lip balm. This week's post will cover deodorant, shampoo, conditioner, and hair detangler.

Deodorant

Before covering homemade deodorant options, let's talk about why it might be a good idea to switch your deodorant if you are using a non-natural option. Commercial deodorants can be laden with numerous objectionable ingredients including artificial fragrances and aluminum (if you are using an antiperspirant/deodorant combination), which is found in abundance in Alzheimer patients. Certain deodorants can block your pores, impairing one of the pathways your body uses to get rid of waste (through sweat). Some ingredients in deodorants can trigger an allergic reaction for some people and cause swelling of the lymph nodes under the arm. 

In addition to all of the cautions about deodorants listed above, many natural health providers are now saying that underarm odor is tied to magnesium deficiency. If this is true, one simple way to address underarm odor would be to address to a potential magnesium deficiency. In addition, keeping to a clean diet and making sure you detox your body will likely help as well.

With the above in mind, some people choose to not use deodorant. After an initial transition phase when they claim there is an odor as their skin detoxes from years of deodorant use, they notice little to no underarm smell when going deodorant free. We have tried this method and found that it actually works. Of all the deodorant options, this is by far the most frugal! 

If the above methods are not for you, however, have no fear. There are many clean deodorant options out there that will not block your pores, add to your toxin load, or drive up your grocery budget. Since this article is about stretching your budget, we will only address options for homemade deodorants. 

There are many recipe options for homemade deodorant on the internet these days. They cover everything from sprays, to roll-ons, to sticks, to paste. While not initially made for this purpose, when I first stopped using deodorant, I would put a light application of the healing salve we make under my arms. It definitely helped with odor, which is no surprise since several of the ingredients have antibacterial/antimicrobial properties. You can find three more homemade deodorant recipes on our Prepped Living website as well as comments on the recipe we have tried.

Homemade Paste Deodorant

Hair Care

We have some basic hair care ideas up on the Prepped Living website. These recipes are ones I printed and kept in a just-in-case folder years ago. It is always helpful to have some very basic ideas to access when needed. However, I was interested in finding something a little more luxurious and fragrant for DIY hair care. I did a bit of searching and found a nice assortment of viable options that fit my parameters:

Shampoo

Like with deodorant, you can find experts on the web that claim you don't need to shampoo your hair at all. Just give it two weeks and the oily stage will self-resolve, leaving you healthy, shiny hair. While my husband had tried this with great success, his hair is short and mine is long; therefore, I have been a bit more trepidatious about going without shampoo and conditioner altogether.

There are many homemade shampoo recipes out there in addition to the one listed on our website. Here are a couple of easy options that look fabulous:

Wellness Mama's Natural Homemade Shampoo uses coconut oil, Castille soap, essential oils, and an optional carrier oil. These are are ingredients that have multiple uses and are simple to keep on hand.

Mountain Rose Herbs's Herbal Shampoo Concentrate has an even simpler recipe that uses Castille soap and essential oils.

Conditioner

Conditioner was a more difficult category for me. Most of the options I found in my research might be good for your hair, but don't necessarily help to detangle it. Furthermore, some of the options I found for homemade conditioners similar to that which you can get at the store actually call for all the chemical based ingredients that are in the commercial products! Since the idea is to help stretch your grocery budget, it seemed better to stick with ingredients that are common non-toxic household items with multiple uses. I stumbled across a great article on Don't Waste the Crumbs. Their article has six different recipes for homemade conditioners that use non-toxic ingredients. They focus on easy recipes that use healthy, common ingredients with multi-purpose uses to maximize your budget. 

Detangler

After the challenge of finding homemade conditioners that also detangle, I decided to look up homemade hair detanglers. I found an article from Life-N-Reflection Simple Living that gives a hair detangler recipe and five tips on how to detangle hair naturally. Their article includes a recipe for a spray-on hair detangler and a link to their conditioner recipe.