Neem oil soap and salve

After my success using neem oil to control insects around the farm and to cure my toenail fungus (how I use neem oil), I did a lot of reading about neem oil and I was keen to try to harness its properties as an anti-microbial and anti-inflammatory to help heal skin. Neem oil itself is a bit of a pain to use, as it goes solid in cold temperatures, liquid when it warms up and it never seems to stay in the bottle. I have tried to take neem oil insect repellent on holiday and ended up with it spilled through my bag. Luckily it does seem to wash out, but I thought it would be easier to use in a more solid form.

eight acres: neem oil soap and neem cream

I came up with a couple of solutions. First I made a soap with 25% neem oil. It smells like neem oil, but I am getting used to the smell. Its kind of nutty and pungent. I gave some of this soap to a friend of North African origins and she thought it smelt nice, so maybe it depends which spices you've grown up with! This soap is great as a pet wash (Taz "loves" taking a bath with neem soap) as it repels insects including fleas. I also gave it to a friend who had dry broken skin on her hands that just would not heal. She has noticed an improvement since using the neem soap and neem salve (below). I know this is not a comprehensive test, but if you are having trouble with dry skin, neem oil may be worth a try. The soap could also be good for kids with nits (I haven't tried that though!).

Taz enjoying some neem oil soap

I wanted my dad to try neem oil on his toe nail fungus seeing as the "expensive cream from the doctor" wasn't working. I thought it would be easier to use if I thickened it with beeswax. I made a salve with 50:50 olive oil and neem oil, and 10% by weight beeswax. This stays in the jar and is more manageable to apply to toenails. It can also be used on dry skin, insect bites, etc to relieve inflammation and kill microbes.

Neem oil is also a great insect repellent and I had been using a commercial neem oil mixture because I didn't want to use DEET, but as it tended to spill I decided to make my own version with beeswax. I use a mixture of citronella, lemon grass, lavender, tea tree and eucalyptus, and 10% neem oil, in olive oil thickened with beeswax. This mixture is effective (when I remember to use it!) and does not spill.

You can get my neem oil soap, neem salve and insect repellent from my Etsy shop here.

**Note that neem oil is not suitable for pregnancy as it has contraceptive properties**

Do you use neem oil? Have you found it heals your skin?

You can get all my tallow soap recipes in my eBook Make Your Own Natural Soap, more information here.

Would you like to try making your own soap from natural ingredients, but don’t know where to start?

This eBook will take you through everything you need to know to make simple soaps from natural ingredients, including herbs, clays, charcoal, oatmeal and coffee grounds.

It also explains how to use tallow in soap. Tallow is cheap and locally available, and it makes long-lasting moisturising soaps, it is an under-utilised ingredient in home soapmaking in my opinion. This eBook includes 10 recipes specifically designed for tallow soap.

Basic Tallow Soap
Pink Clay Soap
Green Herb Soap
True Grit Soap
Black Magic Soap
Salt Spa Soap
Honey and Oatmeal Soap
Neem Oil Soap
Sustainable Shaving soap
Cleaning Soap
Formulate your own

My other soap posts:

Natural soap using beef tallow

Beef tallow soap recipes

Sustainable soap - 100% tallow!

How to rebatch a soap disaster

Why use natural soaps and salves?

Neem oil soap and salve

Shaving soap

Soap with coffee grounds

The new Eight Acres website is live!

Very soon this blogspot address will automatically redirect to the new Eight Acres site, but in the meantime, you can check it out here . You will find all my soaps, ebooks and beeswax/honey products there, as well as the blog (needs a tidy up, but its all there!). I will be gradually updating all my social media links and updating and sharing blog posts over the next few months. I'm very excited to share this new website with you!

Chicken tractor guest post

Sign up for my weekly email updates here , you will find out more about chickens, soap and our farmlife, straight to your inbox, never miss a post! New soap website and shop opening soon.... Tanya from Lovely Greens invited me to write a guest post on chicken tractors for her blog. I can't believe how many page views I get for chicken tractors, they seem to be a real area of interest and I hope that the information on my blog has helped people. I find that when I use something everyday, I forget the details that other people may not be aware of, so in this post for Tanya, I tried to just write everything I could think of that I haven't covered in previous posts. I tried to explain everything we do and why, so that people in other locations and situations can figure out how best to use chicken tractors with their own chickens. The dogs like to hang out behind the chicken tractors and eat chicken poo. Dogs are gross! If you want to read more about chicken tractor

How to make soap with beer (and tallow)

I may have mentioned this before.... soap making is addictive! Once you start, you just want to keep making more soap. And not the same soap, you want to try all sorts of different soaps. I made the mistake of joining a facebook group called Saponification Nation and now my facebook newsfeed is full of glorious soaps, in all colours and shapes, which makes it even harder to resist the urge to experiment. One soap that kept popping up a few weeks ago was soap made with beer. I generally prefer not to use ingredients just for the sake of it, I like to know that they are adding something to the properties of the finished soap. As you know, I don't like to use artificial ingredients either (colours or fragrances). When I read about beer in soap I found out that beer adds sugar to the mixture, which increases lather. I use tallow in my soap, which has limited lather, so anything that adds lather could improve the soap. It also contributes a tan or brown colour to

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