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Where can you start when cleaning your home of bad chemicals found in lotion, soap, perfume, deodorant, shampoo, etc? I can find some websites that list some things that are carcinogens. So I can look up each individual ingredient, but what can I buy to replace it? I'm having a hard time finding things that don't contain terrible ingredients. Even some companies that claim they are healthy add known bad things like sodium laurel sulfate etc. So what are the top ingredients to avoid? Are there any known alternatives for replacing these? Don't really know how to switch up all these bad things in my house. I want to get rid of as much as possible and take a different path.
I make my own laundry soap, softener, glass cleaner, surface cleaner, etc. No harsh chemicals and all do as good a job as what I used to buy. Did I mention save money?
BTW, in the winter I hang my clothes out to dry. Between the homemade laundry soap and the fresh air dry the fragrance is to die for.
Info is on the web.
Google for homemade recipes. Soap powder, all you need is washing soda and borax--I add a little bit of Woolite to it or shavings from Fels Naptha soap for hot water.
Furniture polish--use pure lemon oil. I think I found mine at the Vermont Country Store online.
I don't know what fabric softener is for so I have never used it. Smells horrible in the store so it can't be good for you. I hang my clothes to dry and they don't come out "hard".
Hand and face soaps are hard to find but Pears soap is pretty good and is fragrance free. I prefer Simple Soap but I can't find it except in England. Sometimes you can get good fragrance free soap in a health food store.
For cleanser I don't want one with bleach so I use Bon Ami. I use it on windows and mirrors as well--no wasteful sprays that go all over the place and that you breathe in.
Shampoo is very hard to find but health food stores may have it. If I run out I'll just use my Simple Soap rather than one of those shampoos with all the additives.
Vinegar kills mold and also, if you put something moldy out in the sun, that will kill mold too.
Toothpaste you can use baking soda, peroxide,and glycerin mixed together.
Toilet cleaner, I do give in and pour some bleach into the bowl. Then I get the bathroom fan going and close the door. I use bleach very sparingly, sometimes in the laundry but only if absolutely necessary. The borax that I use will usually whiten just as well as bleach.
Really, you can do a lot with things like vinegar and baking soda. Clean out your drains--just google how to do it. Vinegar, baking soda--those are two important items to have on hand.
I've started doing this recently myself! I originally started looking into how to style my naturally wavy / curly hair and discovered the "curly girl" and no-poo method. They were talking about how silicone and sodium lauryl sulfate are bad for the hair (and skin), so I started reading labels and trying to find stuff for my hair.
From there, I realized that my body lotion sometimes touches my hair and started reading its labels and investigating alternatives.
After that, it was body wash / soap. If SLS was such a harsh surfacant and bad for your scalp and if silicone was so bad at blocking moisture from your hair, it stood to reason that it can't be that great for the biggest organ of your body (skin) to be exposed to it on a regular basis, either!
I think around the same time as I started the hair and skin thing, I had some (pre-existing, recurring) tenderness in my armpits and realized it was probably time for me to ditch my deodorant / antiperspirant for something better for me. Lucky for me, I accidentally tried a "detox clay" deodorant first which I decided didn't work well. I then found a baking soda and shea armpit paste that works GREAT for me. I read afterwards that there is usually a stinky detox period when you stop blocking your armpit pores that the clay deals with. That's probably why the second deo worked so well (I use Schmidts paste in the Lime scent, but Wellness Mama has a very similar recipe on her site I might try when it runs out).
Um, anyway. Sorry. I've been dying to talk to people about stuff like this since I started! I get a lot of info from online blogs and my own research. Currently I'm loving the Wellness Mama website because she has a LOT of very easy clean recipes for things like body wash, lotion, deodorant, hair care, cleaning...
It's funny how everything old is new again. We only started putting all these chemicals everywhere in recent decades. I told my mom excitedly about the apple cider vinegar rinse I was using now that's "all the rage", and she told me how when she was growing up, that's all they had!
Oh, so the vinegar and baking soda list...I'd like to add COFFEE GROUNDS. I drink a lot of coffee and started finding other uses for them like fertilizer / pest repellant for the yard, scalp scrub for my head, facial scrub mixed with olive oil and tea tree oil, body scrub mixed with brown sugar / honey / coconut oil. I even found a recipe for making a garbage disposal scrub bomb thing.
Good luck and have fun with it all!
-T.
Last edited by Tenebrae; 05-22-2016 at 12:03 PM..
Reason: clarified the deodorant part
Back in the good ol' days, say prior to 1940, simple lye soap, borax, vinegar, ammonia, bleach and sodium bicarb performed many of the tasks of cleaning and personal hygiene for which we now rely on fancy-schmancy store-bought products.
While these new products may contain "chemicals," the real question is not should we avoid them, but are they really any problem? Remember that 40,000 Americans are slaughtered on our highways every year. How many die from exposure to sodium lauryl sulfate? Probably none. Certainly there are individuals who must avoid certain products due to allergies, but for most of us, there's no problems nor reason to lose sleep over the question. Keep things in perspective.
OTOH--Maybe the question we should be asking is "are these new products really superior to the old fashioned things like baking soda and vinegar?" I have my doubts.
Superior? Maybe not. More expensive? Well...yeah. I used to spend a ton on shampoo and conditioner, and my hair looked like crap. I've got some of the best hair of my life now totally on the cheap.
Also my body wash I used to use (oh so gentle Aveeno) wasn't cheap. I get a giant bottle of Dr Bronner's castile soap now for a fraction of the cost.
Simple cleansers like vinegar and baking soda and reusing coffee grounds is hella cheap, too. I'm saving money now to buy a house, and I feel pretty good, too! ^_^
Edited to add that I'm really sensitive to chemical / strong smells. My nose and throat feel burned sometimes from them. Since switching to more simple products, I've had less of an issue and way more control over what I smell like. It makes me happy, which you can't really put a price on.
The vinegar hair rinse post reminded me--in my mother's day, they used lemon juice for a hair rinse to make their hair shiny. To condition their hair, they used olive oil and wrapped their hair in a hot towel. It was probably just as good as any product you can buy now.
Oh--and the argument that more people are killed in traffic accidents than are killed by using household chemicals doesn't make sense because, who cares? And who knows? The household chemicals may not kill you as quickly as a traffic accident but after years and years it could build up and then kill you. If not actually killing you, it could cause health problems--and you'll be wondering what on earth is causing these strange health problems, these allergies, these rashes, this asthma--or worse.
I may be retired but I definitely do not care to waste my time making soap just to avoid a miniscule risk that some strangely named chemical is going to harm me or mine.
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