DIY skin and hair care

One thing I find frustrating about trying to live an ecofrugal life is finding personal care products that meet my standards. If price were all I cared about, I could wash my face with any mild cleanser and get pretty good results. But since I also want the products I use to be nontoxic and cruelty-free, I have to read the label on every product looking for ones without parabens and animal testing. The few products on the shelf that fit those criteria can cost ten bucks or more for a bottle—and more annoying still, they often come not in bottles but in tubes. Not only are these non-recyclable, it's pretty much impossible to squeeze all the product out of the tube before discarding it, so you have to toss as much as half an ounce—maybe sixty cents' worth—of your pricey product.

At one point last year, I got frustrated enough over this that I decided to try making my own face wash. I went hunting online for some recipes that weren't too complicated to make and didn't call for any ingredients that were too expensive or hard to find, and I eventually hit on one at Live Simply with only three ingredients: four parts honey, one part olive oil, and four parts aloe vera gel, which I happened to have on hand already because I'd tried it (unsuccessfully) as a hair product. All I had to do was mix the ingredients together and find a container to put them in. I used the bottle from my previous face wash (actually an organic baby wash that I'd been able to pick up cheap because it was discontinued) and applied it with a little manual face scrubber from Sephora.

And lo and behold, it actually worked. In fact, this simple combination of ingredients did a better job of keeping my skin clean and soft than any pricey product I'd shelled out for in the past. The annoying acne-like bumps that had sent me to two different dermatologists over a five-year period, and which still hadn't really gone away even when I started diligently applying two different topical treatments for rosacea morning and evening, vanished almost completely. And each half-cup batch was costing me only 76 cents. All with no animal testing (the honey is an animal product, but the bees don't suffer) and no weird ingredients. I'd found the perfect ecofrugal skin product!

I was so happy with the way this turned out that I thought I'd see if I could manage to pull off the same trick with hair care. I've tried all sorts of products in my hair—cheap shampoos, expensive shampoos, cheap conditioners, expensive conditioners, leave-in conditioners, pomades, hot oil treatments, and various DIY alternatives—and never found a hair care regimen that I was completely happy with. For the past few years, I'd been getting more or less acceptable results by skipping shampoo completely and relying on OGX Coconut Curls conditioner as a co-wash, conditioner, and leave-in all in one, but it wasn't completely ideal; I had to apply quite a lot of it post-shower to tame the frizz, and it left a lot of build-up on my scalp. So I started hunting for some DIY conditioner recipes that might do the trick better, using the same criteria I'd applied for the face wash: a simple recipe with no pricey or hard-to-find ingredients.

Well, this turned out to be kind of a tall order. When I searched for "homemade conditioner," most sources recommended an apple cider vinegar rinse, which I'd already tried with no success whatever, and which obviously wouldn't work as a styling product. When I tried "DIY leave-in conditioner," most sources suggested just taking "your favorite conditioner" and mixing it with water (and maybe a little olive oil) in a spray bottle. Not a bad idea, but not helpful if what you're looking for is an alternative to "your favorite conditioner." An "easy" recipe from Oh, The Things We'll Make! called for an emulsifier called BTMS that you can't just buy at the drugstore, and that I wasn't about to order a whole bunch of just to test out a conditioner recipe that might not even work for me. And a collection of 10 Homemade Hair Conditioners Using Ingredients From Your Kitchen featured only deep-conditioning treatments that you leave on for several minutes and rinse—nothing that could double as a co-wash or a leave-in.

Eventually, I came across this page with 14 Homemade Leave-In Conditioner Recipes specifically for natural curls, of which one—the "Honey Butter Balm"—looked simple enough to be worth a try. It called for only four ingredients, two of which (coconut oil and honey) I already had. I thought I could safely leave out the few drops of lavender oil, which seemed to be just for scent, so all I needed to buy was some pure shea butter. After a bit of searching, I found a 6-ounce container of this at Sally Beauty for about seven bucks—not too bad if I could get six batches of conditioner out of it.

Mixing up the ingredients proved more difficult than I expected. The shea butter was very thick and hard to scoop out of the jar, and it took quite a lot of heating and stirring to get it to combine with the coconut oil and honey. And when I finally got it all mixed and put it in a little tub and chilled it to re-solidify it, as the recipe suggested, the honey dropped out of the suspension and formed a thin layer on the bottom of the container. So I had to stir it in by hand before I could use it.

Sadly, after all that trouble, this did not prove to be the ultimate conditioning solution I'd been looking for. The mixture was still very thick, and while you might think this would just mean a little goes a long way, getting it to go a long way wasn't so easy. By means of rubbing it between my hands and mixing it with water, I finally managed to get my damp hair coated in the stuff, and I actually did feel like it produced pretty enviable curls—but the next day, my hair was limp and bedraggled, completely weighed down by this heavy mixture. Worse still, my regular co-washing routine didn't seem to be enough to get this goop out of my hair again. I had to resort to my husband's shampoo, which I normally shun because it's far too drying, and I still wasn't convinced I'd managed to get my hair quite clean again.

I'm still wondering if there's some way I might be able to put this stuff to use. Maybe if I use only a teeny tiny bit of it, I might be able to get those fabulous curls I enjoyed on my first day without the bad side effects—but how to spread such a teeny tiny bit across my hair is, I will confess, a mystery. So for now, it's back to my old commercial conditioner.

However, I'm not giving up entirely on the idea of finding a DIY solution. This collection of 10 Best Homemade Conditioners For Curly Hair, for instance, includes a three-ingredient conditioner—lemon juice, olive oil, and coconut milk—that could conceivably be worth a try. When I tried straight coconut milk as a leave-in, the results were disappointing, leaving my hair limp and greasy, but it's possible the lemon juice could mitigate that. And if that doesn't work, there's always this flaxseed gel from Naturally Curly. We have all the ingredients for both of these, so even if they don't work, they won't cost too much to try.