Money-Wise Mondays! - Castile Soap

   Today I would like to review a product that saves our family a lot of money. About 5 years ago I have stumbled, purely by accident, onto castile soap. I have been looking for more natural altarnatives to drugstore soaps for a while and I came upon few websites recommending castile soap. At this point I had no clue as to what castile soap was but I set out on a mission to find out. After searching in our local natural health stores I came upon Dr. Bronner's Organic Pure Castile Liquid Soap . I bought it that day and went home to do more research. It looked like just plain ol' liquid soap, but what was it really? I have long since stopped trusting the word "natural" on the package, because most companies will use it nilly-willy to sell their product, even if it's not really "natural". But after a bit more research I found out that castile soaps are made by mixing organic oils with alkali (potassium hydroxide) which reacts with oil to form soap. There are no waste products of this binding, and soaps are natural and chemical free. I was intrigued! One thing I also found out that castile soap is very concentrated and should be diluted with water for most uses on the body.
   So fast forward to today, and our family uses it for many applications.
I always stock at least on large 32 oz bottle in our house, and we use it for many things. First use is to fill up our foam pump soap dispensers. There are number of soaps on the market sold in pump bottles that make the soap come out in foam. They are much easier to use than regular hand soaps, especially for children. These bottles of soap can cost anywhere from 4 to 10 dollars for the drugstore kind and 6 to 15 for more natural ones. Since we have 3 bathrooms and a kitchen where we all regularly use soap that means that we can go through as much as 3 to 5 bottles of hand soaps a month! This can add up to a lot of money. But Dr Bronner's soap saves us from having to buy all these bottles of soap. Once the foam soap dispenser is emptied I just use Dr. Bronner's soap to fill it up. Remember me mentioning that Dr. Bronner's is concentrated and you should dilute it? Well, for foam soap dispenser you dilute it in ration of 5:1 (5 parts water to one part castile soap)! This means that to fill up 9 oz foam soap dispenser you only need 1.8 oz (or a bit under 1/4 cup) of soap. Since I pay 16 to 18 dollars for 32 oz bottle of Dr. Bronners (sometimes I get it for as little as 12 dollars when it's on sale!), it only cost me 90 cents to a dollar to fill each soap dispenser! That is a lot of savings.
   Another use for castile soap around my house is for laundry. For many years I have searched for more natural laundry detergent than the big store name brands. I dislike all the petrochemicals that are in them and all the fragrances. Even the fragrance-free ones leave a lot of chemical residues on clothes. This search became even more important when Girly Monkey was born and we found out that she was allergic to all the detergents that we could find. Even most of the "natural" ones from health food stores gave her a rash on her skin, and if they didn't then they just didn't measure up in cleaning. I tried Dr. Bronner's and found my answer. I add 1/2 oz of the castile soap to my pre-wash dispenser, and 1/2 oz to my main wash. Then I add a scoop of V.I.P Washing Soda and some white vinegar to fabric softener dispenser and my clothes come out clean and residue free. It works especially well since Little Monkey still has "potty accidents" once in a while and his clothes are often smelling of pee. But with this soap there are no lingering smells after the clothes are washed. I also love it for washing my diapers (when I have a baby) and wool covers (I hand-wash them).
   I have HE washing machine and castile soap doesn't foam too much, which makes it a perfect fir for my Miele washing machine.Since the machine was a great investment I wouldn't want to put anything that would damage it, and highly foaming soaps could damage it. Another plus is the cost. The cost of the soap per load is only 45 to 50 cents per load. Even when factoring in the cost of washing soda and white vinegar my total cost is only about 75 to 80 cents to a dollar for very large loads. This might be a bit more expensive than the 35-50 cents per load from a popular store brand (full of petrochemicals and fragrances) but it's still at par with the "natural" plant based laundry detergents plus I save a lot on not having to buy creams for my kid's sensitive skin that now is rash-free because our clothes are residue free.
   Castile soap has many other uses around the house too. There are number of recipes online for making home-made shampoo at home. We have tried that too and it worked very well on kids hair, unfortunately we have very hard water and the castile soap mixes with minerals in the water and leaves my hair too coated with salts (that's what happens when soap binds to minerals), so it didn't work for my hair. But we do use it to make our own body wash.

Here is my recipe:

   1 cup castile soap
   1 cup water
   1 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
   2 tbs melted coconut oil
   1 tbsp vegetable glycerin
   2 tbsp Redmond clay (available at health food stores)
   few drops of essential oils

   Slowly mix clay with 1/4 cup of water at the time in a blender until you mixed in all the water. Mix in all  remaining ingredients well and pour into squirt bottle. When using, you only need to use a bit on a wash cloth as it goes a long way. My skin never looked better with using it!

Castile soap has so many uses around the house that it would be really hard to name them all. From dog wash to toothpaste this product can't be beat. We love that it saves us money as well as environment. There are also less products to buy since one bottle of castile soap will have many uses. If you haven't tried castile soap yet then I suggest you do. Once you do you will never go back to the old way of doing things.