I've gone soap free

While Carbolic is still my favorite soap to use, I've gone soap free for the past 3 weeks, and am loving it. I use a home mad bath scrub, and it is working wonderfully well for me.

Here is why this scrub is a sensible, minimalist solution:

1.       No chenimcal load - it is skin-friendly and non-toxic

2.       It is cheap

3.       It is soil-friendly

The thing is extremely simple to make. You will need

1.       Dried green peas (Rs. 44 per kilo)

2.       Raw rice (Optional – and the cheapest you can find)

I like to use just peas, but rice adds it a coarser texture that you might like. Dry grind peas and rice separately, mix together. If you want it finer, grind further, or sieve. A kilo of mix should last you a couple of months.

Refrigirate the powder to preserve it - remember, no chemical preservatives = risk of worms. You can also add a tablespoon of salt to the mix - this will keep worms away, and will add a safe anti-microbial kick to your scrub.

Fish out a couple of spoonsful before every bath.

While this mix is absolutely complete for you bathing needs, you can, if you wish, add a bit of powdered wild turmeric (curcuma aromatica) for anti-microbial action - about a table spoon for a kilo of ground mix. Wild turmeric doesn't stain clothes the way cooking turmeric does.

Add whatever other herbs you think will boost your scrub with fragrance or healing properties. Frankly, the basic scrub is what will get you clean.

That's it. I follow my usual coconut oil moisturizing routine at the end of my bath, and deodorize with alum. 

Improving shampoo even more

Read my earlier post here and here.

For absolutely the ultimate conditioning effect, use castor oil with Halo shampoo (or any basic low-cost shampoo from a known manufacturer).

I am not going to lie to you - the mix smells a bit like castor oil. Well, castor oil and shampoo fragrances. But it is not bad - it is the kind of natural, earthy fragrance that would smell expensive if sniffed from a small vial in a tiny air-conditioned organic products store à la Auro-boutique.

The important thing is, this mix provides the finest conditioning I've ever experienced (and that includes outrageously priced stylist recommended Schwarzkopf products and similar). The hair feels heavy, lustrous and absolutely silky, while the scalp feel is very comfortable (I have very dry scalp that is prone to flaking especially when I use conditioners).

Especially for daily washing of unoiled hair, this mixture is perfect. If you do not pre-oil your hair, be brave and use 1:1 oil and shampoo, dilute with water as required. (I do not dilute, I enjoy the thick, creamy consistency of the mix.

For pre-oiled hair, try 1 oil : 2 shampoo.

Crystal deodorant

Here’s a cheap, safe(r?) alternative to commercially available deodorants- Potash Alum (potassium double sulfate of aluminium), known in tamil as Padigaram.

Body odor is caused by bacteria growing in the humid folds of skin like the under arms. Commercially available deodorants invariably are scented coktails of questionable chemicals that typically act to block off pores in the area, suppressing sweating and consequently, odor.

I don’t care for the idea of pores being blocked, and prefer to shower regularly and go au naturel when possible. However, most of us, myself included, cannot do entirely without a deodorant either – especially those of us who live in humid climates and need to spend several hours outdoors, inflicting our vile vapours upon the innocent public.

Then, while pottering around in a raw food website (more about that in another post), I found that “crystal deodorants” were touted as safe alternatives to regular deodorants. Some research and roping in CK’s chemistry expertise tells me that these crystals are essentially Alum – ammonium alum in this product's case, but perfectly replaceable with the more commonly available (in India) potash alum.

Older men will remember this as the barber's stone, and gentlemen patrons received a post-shave face swabbing with it in the good old days.

Alum works as a bactericide, and has been used as a deodorant for over 1000 years now. After showering, rubbing alum to the moist underarm region drops the PH value of the skin in that area, rendering it acidic and inhospitable for bacterial growth.

The theory sounded fine, so I am trial running it, this is day 2. So far, I am bloody impressed. Last morning, I used it after shower, headed out and spent the day being my sweaty Sunday self. After about 6 – 8 hours of oily sweat and grime, no discernible odor! Today was also a long, sweaty day out, and Alum held up wonderfully.

My friend is trying it out on her feet that sweat inside shoes and consequently get smelly, and she tells me that she has had a very successful day 1.

Fragrances are important to me, though I hate literally every scented deodorant I’ve tried. Alum doesn’t have any smell of its own, so you can use your favorite fragrance along with it if you wish. Now that I use alum, I've been able to break out my stash of itr (attars). I’m wearing Khus right now, and I smell summer wherever I go.

Despite some half-hearted nay-saying that I saw on the internet about the safety of alum, my logic is simply that alum has been used in our wells to purify/clarify water for ages now, and potash alum is also a common ingredient in certain kinds of pickles.

Sure, over-application on the skin could create enough acid to give you a rash, but used normally, I am convinced you will find this an all-round winner.

You will find alum in old-style herb stores priced at roughly Rs. 20 – Rs.30 for a half kilo of large crystals. Remember that the skin has to be moist, or you must moisten the crystal with a drop of water before use. Don't wet it completely, store dry. No re-application necessary - each application lasts for 10 - 12 hours at least.

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NOTE: People with severe & chronic body odor (persistent despite good hygiene) should try cleaning out their intestines. A thorough 3-day cleanse cures even the worst body odors - tested with positive results by at least two people I know, whose twice a day shower routine wasn't helping with their odor problems.

See a doctor (ayurvedic/siddha) about taking a purgative, ask your mother how to take castor oil, or do a salt water flush for three days, eating only simple, raw vegetarian food on these days. The odor will go away. Caveat: I'm not a doc.

Remedy for a common summer ailment

In summer especially, it is common to develop boils on the rim of the eyelids (called styes). These swell up over time, turn red and painful, often shutting the eye out completely. I usually go to a doctor, get drops and things, and it takes about 3 to 4 days to subside.

I started to get a boil yesterday - it had swollen up a bit, and was making it painful for me to blink. Then my friend Asha suggested a cure - dab some saliva on it several times a day. Apparently this is a well-known remedy, but I had never heard of it.

This was last evening at about 4 PM, when the stye had already inflamed quite a bit. I did the application once every half an hour till bedtime, and this morning the boil is completely gone!!

If you are wondering which is the least unpleasant way to procure saliva, just dip a finger under your tongue to pick up a drop on your finger tip, and dab on the afflicted spot. Repeat often.

Gross, but effective!

Making herbal hair oil

For a few years now, I have taken to oiling my hair regularly before showering - a ritual that I used to detest as a child, but that I quite enjoy these days.

I have no western medical explanation for this, but oiling the scalp regularly is considered "cooling" for the body. I do find that regular oil baths calm the nerves, prevent headaches and in general help me handle the heat much better.

Given my frequent use, I've found it advantageous (and fun) to make my own herbal hair oil.

Ingredients:

Oil (sesame / coconut)
Karisilankanni leaves (Bhringaraja, Eclipta alba / Eclipta prostata, False daisy)
1 clean old cotton towel (the thin "thorthu" ones, or an old square of Veshti)
water
a wok (kadai)
stove

Total time: 60 - 90 minutes

Eclipta Alba:

Bhringaraj or karisilankanni in Tamil is a robust ornamental shrub that is also known as false daisy. While two unrelated species of herbs are both known as Karisilankanni, the Manjal Karisilankanni (Wedelia chinensis / Wedelia calendulacea, yellow flowers) is unrelated to Eclipta, which has smaller but similar leaves and small white flowers.


Eclipta is commonly found in south India, and you should be able to get it fresh in a good produce market. We get it in Madras at the Koyambedu market, in the greens section. A fairly thick bunch retails for Rs. 10.

Oil:

My preference is for sesame (gingelly/til) oil. If you retain the practice of setting your hair with oil, you ought to go with the milder scented and less greasy coconut oil

Like most people, my oil-set hair days are behind me. Since I only use the stuff for soaking before a wash, I prefer the better recommended sesame oil that I find fragrant and calming. Also, sesame oil has a higher smoke point and will not burn easily, and it has a very long shelf life. Coconut oil on the other hand will turn rancid soon if you boil it, so make smaller batches if you choose this oil.

Whatever the oil, try to get fresh-pressed stuff from an oil merchant, and not the expensive, double-refined nonsense that sells in supermarkets.

So, here's the recipe.

Wash the Eclipta leaves for residual soil, and separate the leaves and the green stems from the thicker, darker stalk leading to the root. Place the leaves and stems with just enough water in a processor to grind into a thick batter. Notice that the batter is bluish black.

Place the batter in the towel / cloth square, and wring out all the juice. measure the juice into the wok, and add equal quantity of oil.

Place the wok on the stove, let simmer while stirring occasionally. The water will loudly splutter and eventually boil away completely. You will know this when there mixture quietens down, there is no more water vapour emerging from the wok, and the oil boils up in fine, transparent, foamy bubbles. After this point, don't let the oil boil for any longer, or the sediments will char.

The oil should be a lovely blackish green. Remove from fire and allow to cool, and then store in a glass jar. You don't have to filter out the fine, powdery sediment, it has a nice scrubbing effect on the scalp.

Use liberally on scalp and hair, soak for at least 30 minutes, and wash away with sheekha or shampoo.

I've been using this for over a month, and my hair fall has stopped almost completely. I also don't have flaking and other dry scalp issues, and I notice that my hair is growing faster.

You can use the same technique to prepare Henna (Marudhani, Lawsonia Inermis) oil too. The oil comes out a beautiful saffron orange, and is nice for henna dyed hair.

Note: if you strongly prefer coconut oil, you can try an alternative method. Grind the leaves into a thicker paste with very little water and pat into small flat cakes, leave in the sun till dry and hard. Then, drop the cakes into a glass jar filled with coconut oil, close and leave in the sun for a couple of weeks, several hours each day. The oil will change colour and extract the effective ingredients from the cakes, but wont turn rancid as quickly as when boiled.

These oils are fun to make, extremely good value for money, and are nice way to incorporate natural products into your body maintenance regimen.

Update on Improving shampoo

This is a follow-up to the post Improving shampoo.

I finally got around to testing CK's suggestion about using rice bran oil in place of coconut oil. Also, Instead of the 2 shampoo: 1 oil ratio I had suggested in my original post, I went 1:1 this time and to up the ante, pre-oiled my hair too. Results are terrific! At 2 : 1, you are still using too much shampoo, it turns out you can go with much more oil than you think. And remember, I went 1:1 with rice bran oil, which is a much heavier oil than coconut oil. (Halo shampoo, no water used). The conditioning effect with rice bran is markedly superior when compared to coconut oil.

I shook the mix up to form a mango milkshake-y emulsion. There is no oil smell - unlike with coconut oil which smells, well, coconutty, which I kind of liked, but no oil smell is a good thing for work days.

I had pre-oiled my hair rather heavily, so we are talking about a lot of grease here. I had to use the mix twice - first wash, rinse, then wash again. Not much lather the first time, but small, fine lather the second time around. After the final rinse, hair felt slick but not greasy, like after a conditioner.

Hair is dry now, and feels lovely. No grease, but dark, glossy, well-set look, which is what a really good conditioner will do to straight hair. Remember that this was on pre-oiled hair! I think that if you use the mix without oiling your hair first, you'll still get a gentle wash, leading to hair that looks moisturized, but also has bounce and body. It is also possible that to was unoiled hair, you could go with even more oil in the mix. I'll try it out.

But remember, these are proportions for Halo shampoo, which is a regular surfactant based shampoo that I find quite drying on its own (same as sunsilk, pantene and even biotique in my experience). If you are trying this with some other brand of shampoo+conditioner or a very gentle cleanser, you could try and go with lesser oil.

To summarize the differences between using rice bran oil and coconut oil in the mix - with rice bran oil, there is slightly lesser lather. No smell other than the shampoo fragrance. gentler cleaning, softer, silkier hair post-wash.

Where costs are concerned, rice bran oil is probably one of the cheapest vegetable oils out there, retailing at Rs. 70 - 90 per liter.

Rice bran oil is available at all supermarkets, just like sunflower oil, etc.

If you want to try this with other oils, knock yourself out! But comeback and tell us what happened. I'll live up to my promise and try the mix with castor oil, just for kicks :-D

PS: here is another suggestion, also from CK - for itchy scalp, infections or dandruff, add a couple of drops of dettol. Hm! Will certainly try this.

Improving shampoo

Last week while traveling I found a neat way to improve shampoo, and make it last longer.

But first – my favorite and preferred hair wash solution is a mix of powdered shikha (Acacia concinna) and "arapu/chigare” (Scientific name?. Safe, extremely inexpensive, and completely biodegradable.  I mix a table spoon of both these powders with warm water to batter consistency to wash oiled hair. Admittedly, this is not for busy workdays.

Shampoos are convenient, but more expensive than traditional cleansers, non-biodegradable and bad for soil health, and their safety level for human use is dubious at best.

That said, chances are it is going to take a lot of lifestyle change before you give up shampoo altogether, so here are ways to lessen the evil.

I find shampoo use complicated because I find that it dries out my scalp and hair, which means I’ve to either oil my hair heavily, or use a conditioner. Most likely the latter, because even if I oil my hair, shampoo ends up stripping the oil off completely.

Moreover, shampoo is unnecessarily thick. You can dilute it considerably, even though the bottle says not to.

To combat the drying factor, dilute shampoo with part oil and part water. The oil softens the shampoo considerably, and has a superb conditioning effect on hair.

Take about  20 ml of shampoo in an empty bottle, and add 10 ml of oil, and 10 ml of water. Shake well. Upon shaking the contents form a  milky emulsion. Contents will settle, you’ll need to shake the bottle every time before use.  I don’t know yet if the oil will turn rancid, so make small batches just enough for a week.

The effect of adding oil directly to shampoo is very pronounced. You don't have to pre-oil - hair turns out perfectly conditioned and set. The lather is rich and fine, and when you rinse off, don't get nervous about the slightly slick texture - this is similar to the slickness that conditioners leave behind, and will disappear when dry. I am now trying to find the threshold at which oil becomes too much in the shampoo, so I can stay just south of that mark. The water is for dilution only – maybe I can do away with that entirely, I don’t know yet.

Which shampoo?

This should work with any shampoo – use your favorite. I tried it first with an almost empty bottle of Biotique soy protein shampoo. Nice, I loved the smell, but pricey.

I am really not convinced about the value you are getting with expensive shampoos over inexpensive ones. If you are going for a laureth sulfate -free shampoo, you are on to something good, but most of the branded shampoos in the market have the same poisons, so why pay more?

From a value perspective, the cheapest shampoo on the market (from a reputed manufacturer) turns out to be good old Halo (M/f Colgate-Palmolive) from my childhood. There is only the yellow “egg protein” variant available, and only in 1 liter bottles. The price is Rs. 235 for the litre. In Chennai there is a Rs.30 off too, so I got it for Rs. 205. A casual price check on the supermarket shelves tells me that the rest retail at Rs. 150 - 200 and above for a 400 ml bottle.

Which oil?

Coconut is fine. Light, mild scented. I am not sure how other vegetable oils will hold up – for one, the smell should be too intense. I am very tempted to try castor oil though, will let you know what happens.

Coconut oil costs Rs. 140 per litre bought loose at the old fashioned oil merchant’s. Bottled varieties like meera etc cost around Rs. 200, and I find they give you pointless enhancements. (Advansed?? Yeah well,  I am not spending nearly Rs. 300/L for poor spelling, Parachute).

At 2:1 ratio, Halo+coconut oil works out to Rs. 180 per litre, which is substantially cheaper (on the average around 70%) than even the mid-range varieties like Sunsilk, and you don’t have to buy a conditioner, which makes it even better value.

I’ve just washed my hair with this mix, and  while I do (ahem!) have naturally soft and silky hair, my hair feels even more fabulous than usual (:-D). Those of you with dry, frizzy conditioner-dependant hair, please try this out and let me know.

Like I said, go with more oil than what I have suggested, or try out various proportions till you find one that works for you.

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U P D A T E  !!!
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CK has as usual beaten me in the value-for-money race. He sees my coconut oil, and raises me rice bran oil.

Like coconut oil, rice bran oil has no strong scent or colour. However, it is slightly more greasy without being too viscous, which ought to make the conditioning effect better than the thinner, lighter coconut oil. And here's what'll interest the hardcore value hunter: coconut oil costs Rs. 140 per liter, while RB oil costs roughly half as much at Rs. 70!! That means a 2:1 halo to RB oil mix totals to Rs. 160 per liter!!

I'll try it out myself to test the feel, and post here.

cleaning

Lemons / White Vinegar
Salt
Baking soda

If you have the above four, you can handle many cleaning situations at home.

While rinsing water bottles and flasks, use salt+baking soda to scour and rinse. The salt disinfects, and the soda deodorizes.

Use water+salt+vinegar solution to wipe kitchen countertops and table tops. It disinfects reasonably well, and the sour smell discourages flies.

These items are cheap and safe. Avoid using commercially available spray solutions - they are invariably harmful, expensive and the 100% germ killing is impractical, and in any case unnecessary.

12/02/2011

Thanks anonymous commenter, for the tip on using borax. Borax is cheap, and especially suitable for bathrooms and other wet areas. Use with caution in the kitchen, because borax, though natural is harmful if ingested, so you'll need to rinse it our thoroughly to keep it from getting into your food. Read more about borax here.

Skincare: Make your own moisturizer

I know of no woman that is so butch as to not keep a stash of skin care products. Even “low maintenance” women end up with a lot of cosmetic stuff that they pick up, often more out of impulse than of any real need. I challenge any woman to walk around a bath & bodyworks kind of store and not squirm and salivate.

Over time though, one realizes that most “skincare” products are actually nonsense. Most of what you really need, you can make at home.

Let us start with moisturizing:

Note:  There are several elaborate recipes even for homemade products, some of which are possibly valid cures for special skin conditions. However, since this blog is about simplicity and minimalism, We'll look at the simplest solution possible.

Dry skin can be itchy and annoying. Moisturizing is essentially creating a film of barrier on the skin to lock moisture in. The best moisturizer in my entire experience is a light oil rub down, right after shower. Just before you towel off, shake a couple of drops of oil (coconut) on to your wet palm, rub vigorously till the water in your palm and the oil forms a milky emulsion. Spread all over, rub in well. Leave for a  couple of minutes and do a very quick rinse (no soap this time). Pat dry, and you are done.

After several expensive bottles of fancy moisturizers, I found that this simple solution is what works best even in Canadian winter, when your skin turns to parchment and the best of moisturizers turn out to be chemical cocktails (Propylene glycol? Parabens? Acrylamide? No thank you) that don’t work, and very likely are slow-poisoning you.

You can use lighter mineral oils or baby oil if you like, but you are just flushing your money down the loo. That, and I wouldn't trust mineral oils all that much either.


For especially dry skin or patches like knees and elbows, wet the area thoroughly, and rub in lots of warm oil. soak for a few minutes and rinse off. Once every while, a warm castor oil soak is great for even the driest skin. Coconut oil will still work, but the thick, viscous castor oil is an elixir for dry, flaky skin. Remember that oil itself will not moisturize - moisture is essentially water. So wet the area well first. 

From the money angle, a 200 ml coconut oil bottle (Parachute and similar) costs roughly Rs. 30. A 200 ml bottle of moisturizer costs anywhere from 3 to 10 times as much, depending upon the brand.


So give the intense therapy silky pearl body milk cocoon BS a rest, and grab a bottle of trusty old CO at the grocer's.