BLULOW (All About Living Green)

Have we allowed the advertisers and marketers to dictate our tastes and preferences or are we in control and we determine what we need and want?

Just turn on your TV and you are told that you are not happy unless you are wearing the latest style in clothes, driving the most up to date car while taking the prescription drug du jour (with those nasty little side effects). Fido will live longer if you feed him the appropriate dog food and your kids can never be happy unless they have the latest thumb strengthening electronic gadget.

Now, pretend that you live in a remote location without the benefit of television and constant radio advertisements. You and you alone determine what makes you happy and what you need in order to survive. The ‘keeping up with the Joneses advertising’ does not exist.

I took you through that mental exercise because I wanted to talk to you about making homemade liquid hand soap. Yeah, I know, I just ragged on the advertising industry, now I’m going to talk about making something that they have ‘created a need’ for in our homes. Let’s face it, I don’t know about you but when I was a child, we used bar soap to wash our hands before dinner and it worked just fine.

Anyhow, now that liquid hand soap has become a ‘necessity’ let’s make our own instead of buying it from the store. The recipe is not complicated and the soap achieves the affect that soap was created for. It thoroughly cleans your hands.

There is no magic formula. Don’t be led astray by all of the complicated formulas and ingredients. What we’re going to make here is basic homemade liquid hand soap. The most economical way to make it is to save all of the small soap fragments that you’ve collected over time. However, if you don’t have saved soap fragments, a bar of soap will work just as well.

Here’s what you do:

In a pot, bring about 3 cups of water to a boil. While the water is coming to a boil, shave the bar of soap into fragments, or break up the already small pieces of left over soap. The smaller the fragments, the quicker they will dissolve in the boiling water.

Stir the soap into the boiling water until the soap completely dissolves. Once the mixture is cool, pour it into your old soap dispenser. You will note the mixture is not as thick as store-bought soap (if consistency is an issue for you, use less water and more soap). However, you’ll find the watery hand soap mixture works exceedingly well in creating a lather and cleaning your hands.

Here’s where the advertising and marketing exercise from above comes into play. The advertisers will have us believe that the thick gel type liquid hand soap is necessary to get our hands clean. Oh contraire!

If you prefer to have a different scent, experiment with essential oils. Only a drop or two is necessary.

This is a basic no fluff recipe for homemade liquid hand soap. It will clean your hands thoroughly. After all, that’s what you want the soap to do, isn’t it?

By the way, how much did this cost you?

Score another one for thinking blulow!