DIY Homemade Body Wash ~ Lavender Wisteria

  

My mom and I made our own body wash this week! I had seen an easy tutorial on Pinterest (yes.. I know. I have a problem. I am hooked. Can't help myself!) to make hand soap so we thought we'd try it on body wash. (something that I was desperately in need of as I had been using my husbands bar soap for days now..) 'Manly' is not quite the fragrance I go for most days.

Anyways... we used Yardley's Lavender Wisteria bar soap although any, all natural soap would work great. (I'm not sure how the deodorants would melt in soaps such as Irish Spring)

 You will need:

• About 8 oz of an all natural bar soap (we used two 4 oz. bars at $4.99 each)
• Grater (I used our kitchen grater.. it is just soap after all!)
• 2 Tbsp of Glycerin (I found mine at CVS near the skin lotions and Vitamin E) $5.79 for the bottle but we barely used any of it. A one time cost for gallons and gallons of liquid soap.
• Large stock pot (again, just out of my kitchen)
• A gallon of water
• Funnels of different sizes (see below.. we made our own!)
• Large metal spoon (we used a wooden one that I'll keep just for soap now)
• Electric beater
• Containers to put your finished body wash in (we upcycled some from our recycle bin.)

 How to:

Step One, grate your soap! This is the hardest part of the whole process! It's a 'grate' arm workout! *groan*

We grated ours onto parchment paper.

Next, put your soap shavings, the gallon of water and the 2 Tbsps gylercin into the stock pot. Put it on the stove and set the heat to medium. We didn't boil ours, just let it heat up. It smells so wonderful when it's warming up!

Stir your soap mixture gently until all the soap shavings dissolve/melt. You will have a nice cloudy soft mess in about 5 minutes.

Take your pot off the heat and let your soap sit. It'll start to thicken in a few hours but needs 8-12 hours to completely set and cool. Once set, it'll be the strange consistency of goop. Part solid, part snot. Sorry, there is no other way to describe it. You'll understand.

Next, stir it up as best as you can to loosen it, then use your mixer with beaters to mix it. this breaks apart most of the globs and smoothes it out.

Lastly, use some creative funnel mojo to pour your newly made bodywash into your recycled containers. I used an old J&J baby shampoo bottle for what I'll use in my shower and the rest I poured into a cranberry juice container to refill from later. My mom took half a gallon in a half gallon milk carton.

That's it! You're all set to use your body wash! An entire gallon of it! The only thing a bit strange, (not bad, just strange) is it's a bit slimey? I guess is the word. I smoosh it into my washcloth and it works perfectly and smells wonderful! That's the only thing 'wierd' about it.

When my husband got home the other night and asked "Why? why make it when you can buy it?" Well, Because.. because it keeps ten? plastic bottles out of landfills or from needing to be recycled. Because, now I know EXACTLY what is in my soap. Because it saves money! A lot of money! you can buy 20 oz of all natural, organic body wash for about $10. My mom and I made 128 oz for $15 which includes the full price of the glycerin. Next time it'll be only $10! Six times the product, for the same price and no waste. You can't beat that! It makes sense for EVERYONE, even if you can afford to buy it.

Oh, wait. there was a bit of waste. The two soap boxes. Here is an idea for upcycling them, too.

Open your box carefully along the seam. Flatten it out. Flip it inside out and close the seam with a bit of glue or clear tape. Fold the tabs in and voila! A pretty little box just the perfect size for giftcards, jewelry, etc.. (and it smells lovely!)

THERE. Now there is NO waste.

Feel free to Pin any of the images from this post, just please make sure they link back here!

Thank you! Enjoy!
xoxo~

Abbie

Comments

[Caron]

Very cool, Abbie! I'll keep this in mind.

[Shannon]

I made this today. I cut the soap into smaller pieces and then used my food processor to grate it, and it worked really well. I'm so excited about all the money I'm going to be saving by doing this! Thank you!

[Shannon]

I made this today. I cut the soap into smaller pieces and then used my food processor to grate it, and it worked really well. I'm so excited about all the money I'm going to be saving by doing this! Thank you!

[Jenny's Heart]

Brilliant! I am going to have to do this soon. Thanks so much.

[LeeAnne Leonard]

I made this yesterday and it's still rather thin. I followed the instructions. Any suggestions to thicken it? Thanks!

[Courtney]

I made this today. Wow! Amazing is all I have to say. It saves a lot of money!!

[Tami]

I am going to try this one! I make my own hand soap already and have found that an old Salad Shooter works great for grating soaps and saves a lot of time!

[Jen]

Hey there LeeAnne,

You may try putting it back on the heat over low (simmering) to reduce the mixture. This will just allow some of the extra water to evaporate out of it and it should thicken, I would expect.

I'll be trying this myself in the next week or so (I'm almost out of body wash, LOL!).