Nowadays, I have recipes for so many homemade products, sometimes it’s really funny to look back on my old self: how I used to buy item after item for each and every possible purpose and ended up jamming the drawers and cabinets with too many bottles. Some didn’t live up to their claims, so I tried out other brands, and ended up with multiple bottles of the similar thing, mostly half used. Can you imagine the mess?
Since then, I have learned to make most of the household cleaning products and bathroom essentials with just a few basic items and find that they can be just as effective, but less harsh on our skin, like this homemade body wash with just 3 ingredients: pure castile soap, honey, and apricot oil.
I had bought the liquid castile soap for my children as their skin itch and flare up for subsequent hours after bathing with body shampoos and soap bars. I tried countless body wash, the gentle ones, the soapless ones, the SLS-free ones, the PH5.5 ones, none worked. In fact, I almost gave up on the first bottle of castile soap with citrus oil blend, which still gave my children rashes. It was only when the shop owner recommended the unscented version that I hit the jackpot. Since then, I have discovered that the same castile soap can be diluted in different ways to clean almost anything.
We are doing fine with the easiest and a highly diluted recipe of 1 parts unscented castile soap and 9 parts water, partly to save some moolah (this comes up to about $30 for more than 9 liters of body wash after dilution, though I am still sticking to the cheaper soap bars most of the time), and partly because I have learned that the amount of bubble doesn’t equate to the effectiveness of the soap. But occasionally, this mummy likes to get creative by adding pantry items for some much-needed nourishment of the epidermis. Truth is, I derived a lot of affordable body care with luxurious sounding ingredients from the kitchen to pamper myself with, think ‘Himalayan Pink Salt’, ‘Coconut Milk’, ‘Oats’, ‘Molasses’, etc. Come to think of it, many large brands also list these products on their ingredient list, but I am sure my homemade versions are more generous with these natural ingredients by proportion, just read on!
Finally, the best part about homemade body wash is that I don’t have to commit myself to a huge bottle of body wash for months. I can make as little as a 30ml bottle that is akin to sampling, just in case of allergy, or a slightly larger 100ml if I really like it.
Homemade Honey + Apricot Oil Body Wash
3 parts unscented liquid castile soap 1 part honey ** 1 part apricot oil***
** I used normal honey, but raw honey that has additional anti-bacterial properties, for an even more luxurious touch.
*** can be replaced with other scented or unscented oil, e.g. jojoba oil, sweet almond oil, olive oil, coconut oil.
Pour everything into a clean container and shake to mix them up. Don’t fill up the container to the brim as you need some air space to shake and mix the ingredients. The ingredients will separate again when left sitting on the counter after a while, simply shake before each use.
Optional 4th ingredient: as the liquid castile soap I used is unscented, I sometimes like to add a few drops of essential oil to the final mix as natural fragrance.
MONO and CO 