Above is a step by step video of how…and why, to make your own hand soap!
Adam and I keep joking that many of our hobbies are suddenly cool. Like: having a garden, making kombucha, me cutting his hair, making sourdough bread…and he just told me kettle bells are sold out everywhere! He’s been using them for a while so this makes him feel extra cool!
While you’ll be hard pressed to find flour right now…seeds are becoming hard to come by…and apparently you can’t buy kettlebells, you can still find what you need to make your own hand soap!
WHY SHOULD WE MAKE OUR OWN HAND SOAP? LET ME SHARE!
When you make your own soap with Castile soap/a concentrate and water you:
- Save money! A lot of it. The average bottle of soap is $3.50, and around $5 if you are buying a cleaner brand like “Everyone Soap“. You can buy a 16 oz bottle of Dr Bronner’s Castile soap (link) for $10-20 depending where (for anyone local I buy mine at Market Basket), or you can buy a bottle of Branch Basics (link) for $49 – and use Branch Basics for almost all of your cleaning needs! Based on my math, each homemade bottle is between .75 cents and $1.50.
- Create much less waste. Invest in the foaming pump bottles (link) ONE TIME, and then you can reuse over and over again. Unlike buying soap in a container that you both: can’t recycle the pump, and it’s often too hard to get the bottle clean to be able to properly recycle it.
- Most soaps contain harsh ingredients that can be very drying to our skin. I’ve heard from many of you your hands are cracking and bleeding from so much hand washing.
- While washing our hands is the MOST important thing right now, many commercial soaps contain harmful ingredients like sodium laurel sulfate, parabens, fragrance and EDTA.
- COVID-19 is a virus, not a bacteria – so those harsh anti-bacterial soaps aren’t doing anything extra to help you kill that potential virus on your hands.
- I find my kids are able to wash their hands more effectively with a foaming soap.
- And most important right now: HAND WASHING WITH SOAP AND WATER IS ONE OF THE MOST EFFECTIVE WAYS TO PREVENT THE SPREAD OF GERMS – as recommended by the CDC.
Please note: Especially now, soap is soap is soap. We all need to wash our hands, and when we are not at home we can’t be picky about our options. BUT, as I always say – control what you can control in your own home! Many of us are home more than usual right now, so invest in a bottle of Dr. Bronners or Branch Basics, and swap that soap. (Finn helps me make it which is ever better!)
HOMEMADE FOAMING HAND SOAP
Yield: One bottle of soap
INGREDIENTS:
- 1 part soap (1.5 ounces/2 TBSP for an 8 ounce pump bottle)
- 4 parts filtered, distilled or boiled water* (5 ounces for an 8 ounce pump bottle)
PREPARATION:
- Grab your foaming pump bottle, and fill it ⅘ of the way to the top with water. It is hard to give exact measurements because every foaming bottle holds a different amount of ounces. (leave about 2 inches of space between the water and the top of the bottle)
- Squirt “1 part” of your soap in the bottle to round out the liquid – Dr Bronner’s or Branch Basics – it will end up being about 1 inch of concentrate depending on the size of the bottle.
- Place the pumper in the bottle, screw on. Give it a shake and there you have it…you made your own soap!! It really is that easy.
*If you aren’t going to use the soap with in 3-4 weeks, use boiled or distilled water. We got through about one bottle of homemade soap a week, so we just use our filtered water.
Notes:
- If you add the soap first and then put the water on top, it’s just going to get sudsy. I have done this before and it’s not a huge issue, but it’s easier to add water and then soap.
- Things are taking forever to arrive from Amazon right now! If you can’t get the pumpers in a timely fashion, you can use any empty foaming pumper bottle.
- If you want to try Branch Basics (I really can’t recommend it enough…here is a code for $10 off your first order). We have also been using it to wash a lot of our produce lately!
