Yeah, you guessed it. I make most of my  personal care products.

Updated: March 2023

I no longer recommend most of the DIY products/recipes I used in 2012. These didn’t really work out *that* badly for me, but the main reason they didn’t is that allergenic products were WORSE for my skin than the DIY stuff I was using.

What I’m doing now is home formulating my own ph balanced, water-based formulations using actual cosmetics ingredients and broad-spectrum preservatives to protect against microbial growth. My reasons for switching away from “food on your face/in your hair” recipes is:

1. Many of the options I was using were very high or low PH and literally caustic. Again, these were doing better for me than corny things, but barely.
2. Oils do not moisturize your skin. Water moisturizes your skin. Oils can help seal that moisture in, but there is only so much they can do. It is far better for your skin if you can apply a product to your face that contains water, a humectant, and a number of emollients that may or may not include oil.
3. No-poo low-poo type hair recipes are often not PH balanced are are also not great at actually cleaning your hair. Even using the Carina Organics shampoo and conditioner was not cutting it- the coconut oil in the conditioner built up on my hair and the single very gentle amphoteric surfactant in Carina’s shampoo, cocamidopropyl betaine, was not strong enough to remove that oil. Over time my hair began to streeetch and stretch when wet and eventually snap off. I had a microscope analysis done to my hair and even though I had washed the sample I sent them several times in the Carina shampoo, they still could not see the cuticle of the hair in their microscope because there was a film of buildup over the whole thing. They had to wash it in a special detergent that people would not use on hair that was still growing out of their head to see anything.

All that said, I am still using a few DIY type recipes. Those are listed below.

I am still narrowing down my home formulated shampoo, conditioner, lotion, if you want to understand the basics of what it looks like to formulate your own products, I would start with the blog Humblebee and Me and her youtube channel. She is not formulating for allergies so you wouldn’t likely be able to use any of her formulations as-is, but you can at least get an idea what it looks like to do this kind of thing if you wanted to get into it for yourself.

Continue reading “Personal Care Recipes: Corn Free Personal Care” →