Eight Acres

Blog reader Jeriann Ireland offered to send me a post about homemade health and beauty products.  This is of course an interest of mine, as I make a lot of different products myself.  Some are just personal experiments and some I share on my Etsy shop .  My reasons are much the same as Jerriann discusses in this post - save money, know the ingredients and take control of your health.  Jeriann is a writer and crafter who makes homemade body care products and fun craft items, mostly as gifts for her friends and family. She loves learning about beneficial and harmful ingredients in everyday products and finding alternatives that fit her health goals. See more of her writing at dairyairhead.com . ********* I used to think that “health and beauty” as a category was a bit odd. Health and beauty aren’t necessarily related. You can be healthy and ugly, and you can be beautiful and sick. But when you look at what society considers beautiful, it’s often tied to ...

I wasn't sure if I would like The Hands-On Home: A Seasonal Guide to Cooking, Preserving & Natural Homekeeping , by Erica Strauss, so I requested it from the library rather than buy it.  I really shouldn't have been surprised by how much I enjoyed reading it, as I have been following Erica's blog Northwest Edible Life  and she always explains interesting and complex concepts with a dose of humour and common sense.  Her blog has covered canning, fermenting, eating in season, growing vegetables, backyard chickens and ducks among other things.  Also lots of cooking because Erica is a trained chef. I (incorrectly) expected this book to be mostly recipes.  As in food recipes.  So I was very pleased to see recipes for cleaning products and body products.  Not only does it begin with a comprehensive explanation of kitchen basics, fermentation, canning and making chicken broth, she also goes into detail of how various cleaning products work (and therefor...

Before I started making soap I used to buy a soap with coffee grounds in it.  It was a "gardener's soap", the coffee grounds were supposed to help with scrubbing dirt off your hands.  Recently I decided to try making something similar.  I found a few recipes ( here  and  here ) to get an idea of how much coffee to use. The recipes say to use fresh coffee grounds and fresh espresso to make the lye, but as we don't drink coffee, and this was just for washing hands, I wanted to use waste coffee grounds instead.  We got some from a friend of a friend with a cafe and I dried them in the woodstove.  I used packets of instant coffee that I keep around in case someone wants a coffee. I decided to use half tallow, quarter coconut oil and quarter olive oil for this recipe as the coconut oil adds more suds and that seemed appropriate for a soap that would be used to clean hands.  The recipes also suggested that the coffee would remove other odours....

I stopped using shampoo in January 2012, I wrote about not washing my hair a few months later .  I hadn't done any research at the time, it was kind of my version of " do nothing farming " but for hair care.  I really did wonder what would happen if I did nothing.  For over a year, I washed my hair in water only.  It was quite a simple transition because at the time I was only using a very mild organic shampoo once a week anyway.  I didn't notice much difference between how my hair was without washing, and how it used to be by the end of the week (just before I washed it again).  It looked permanently like it kind of might need a wash soon, but it also just seemed to reach a certain level of oil and just stay like that, it doesn't get worse and worse, it seemed to me that it was a natural equilibrium and I was happy to leave it alone. I then started occasionally using our homemade soap , especially if we did any farm work that involved me getting actual d...

We have been using a natural toothpaste for years, its probably one of the first changes that we made from a "conventional" lifestyle to our current weird hippy lifestyle. At first I just wanted to avoid sodium lauryl sulphate in commercial toothpaste. But there are other ingredients that I also found suspicious, artificial sweeteners, flavours and fluoride all made me a little nervous. I don’t want to get into the conspiracy theories around fluoride (here is a relatively balanced article , and one from the other end of the spectrum ), except to say that I’ve looked at the data on flouride and tooth decay and I’m not convinced that mass-flouridisation prevents tooth decay, so I’d rather avoid it. I bring my own rainwater to Brisbane so I don’t have to drink town water, so my consumption is fairly low. I went to the dentist last year, after a break of a couple of years, and I was pretty nervous.  Even though I was sure I was doing the right thing, I wondered how I w...

I often forget how much plastic is in a "normal" bathroom.  Bottles, tubes and tubs of shampoo, conditioner, bodywash, deodorant, hairspray, hair gel, hair dye,  moisturiser, cleanser, toner, eye wrinkle cream, make up remover, make up containers x a million, toothpaste, tooth brush, toilet paper packaging, razors, shaving cream etc.... more on that in a minute.... This July Pete and I are taking up the challenge once again to reduce and analyse our single use plastic consumption with  Plastic Free July . What's plastic-free in my bathroom? Homemade soap (details here and here ) Homemade deodorant ( recipe here ) Homemade skin salve ( recipe here ) Damadi moisturiser (made in Australia, packaged in glass jars that I reuse for the above) Shaving stick and brush homemade salve What's still plastic? Toothpaste (Miessence organic, in a plastic tube, something I should make, any suggestions?) Toothbrushes (just the normal supermarket version, I tri...

Deodorant has been on my list of things I’d like to make for myself for a while now. I have been using a natural deodorant from Miessence for ages, it only contains aloe vera, baking soda and essential oils. And it works ok. To be honest I don’t really care that much, I don’t even use it if we are going to be doing farm work all day and not going anywhere special. I use it on work days, but I sit in air con, so I don’t sweat much. If I’m going out in summer, no amount of deodorant is going to control sweat in the climate we live in (hot and humid), but I will apply deodorant anyway, may as well try to smell nice. So if you’re picky about these things, I’m probably not a good reference point if you actually care what you smell like! homemade deodorant Anyway, I’d better start from the beginning before I get into making deodorant. I changed from conventional deodorant to the natural brand a while ago because I wasn’t happy with all the extra ingredients. See this link , which l...

Its true, I haven't washed my hair since January.  I have rinsed it in water a few times, but I haven't used any soap or shampoo, or even the "no poo" baking soda and apple cider vinegar mixtures that I've read about.  The idea came following a post I did back in December about eliminating cosmetics from my life.  One reader commented that she didn't wash her hair and it made me wonder if that could work for me (unfortunately I lost that comment when I changed commenting systems, so I don't remember who it was, feel free to comment again!).  Finally I decided to give it a try in early January and I haven't regretted it. I have had long hair for a few years, but I have also tried very short hair in the past, I found that I had to use too many "products" and wash my hair too frequently when it was short, so now I prefer it long, at least shoulder length.  As I've written before , I now use no products in my hair and never dye my hai...