Direction 2: beauty products

In addition to giving her recipes for cleaning products, Raffa also discussed beauty regimes. She relies heavily on Aleppo Soap. But she also gave the recipe of her homemade deodorant. That caught my attention, because I have been avoiding commercial deodorants with aluminium chlorohydrate for years, but I was keen to find an effective homemade alternative.

I got hold of a 100ml spray bottle in Superdrug. I tried to use it for the furniture polish recipe but the lemon bits blocked it! I recycled it to use for Raffa's deodorant recipe: 75% witch hazel, 25% cider vinegar, 15 drops of essential oils. I'm on my 2nd batch, which I tweaked a little. It's really zingy.
This is followed by the use of an alum crystal. In French, this should be potassium aluminium, but the one I use is ammonium aluminium. Some people have an issue with the fact that it still contains aluminium.

 

There are a lot of books with beauty recipes out there:

• a Home Spa book from Marks & Spencer I got ages ago suddenly looked more interesting;
   
• so did the Green Beauty Bible that had been sitting on my shelf for a while;

• 1001 Health & Beauty Hints by Mary Rose Quigg, a charity shop find;

• A Green Guide to Natural Beauty by Karen Gilbert, really excellent;

• Recipes for Natural Beauty by Neal's Yard Remedies;

• The Ultimate Natural Beauty Book by Josephine Fairley (of the Green Beauty Bible);

• several recipes by James Wong from the Grow Your Own Drugs BBC website, but eventually I got the book too;

• The Handmade Soap Book by Melinda Coss;

• Country Traditions by Stephanie Donaldson;

• Homemade by Reader's Digest;

• Gifts from your Kitchen by Deborah Nichols;

• Green Living by Sarah Callard & Diane Millis;

• Precycle! by Paul Peacock.

 

I made a batch of soap in November based on Dr Sara's supermarket soap recipe in Making Stuff: An Alternative Craft Book. I thought it had gone completely wrong but it's turned out OK. I used olive oil, sweet almond oil and coconut oil.

 

As Christmas presents, I made some milk bath following Karen Gilbert's recipe and some bathing salts based on Karen Gilbert's recipe, but without the Dead Sea salts as I didn't have any in stock. It took me some time to decide on the essential oil blend for the latter as it was for someone who suffers from chronic fatigue syndrome / myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME).

 

In the pipeline:

• improving my toner, which is just witch hazel at the moment,
• testing various face mask recipes for oily/combination skin,
• pampering my other half with a foot bath and a sensitive skin face treatment,
• making something for the bath to soothe childhood eczema,
• making some lip balm.

Other projects will have to wait until I have used up all the products in the bathroom cupboard!