Clean living is quickly becoming a popular way to live. I’ve noticed the amazing benefits from the many changes I’ve made in my life, but it wasn’t until recently that I thought about extending clean living to the household products I use.
A perfect example of an easy change to make in your life is making your own citrus dish soap. Not only is conventional dish soap potentially damaging to the environment, but it also creates unnecessary plastic that we can definitely do without. So here is my recipe for making natural citrus dish soap at home.
Ingredients
- 1 cup of castile soap
- 2 tsp of vegetable glycerin
- 1 tsp of salt
- 15 drops of lemon essential oil
- 30 drops of grapefruit essential oil
- An empty glass jar or dish soap bottle
Castile soap is one of the best natural soaps you’ll find. It’s essentially made from olive oil and soda, so is perfectly natural and kind to the environment and your hands. The citrus essential oils help to cut through grease, along with smelling lovely, and the salt is a great abrasive substance. I’d recommend using coarse sea salt as this is less likely to dissolve in the soap, meaning you still get the abrasive qualities.
Method
Simply add all the ingredients to the jar and add around half a cup of water. Then all you need to do is shake the ingredients together and you’ve got your soap! The salt will settle at the bottom, so you’ll need to shake it before every use to combine the ingredients again.
Alternative recipes
The ingredients and method given above are a pretty good base recipe to use as natural DIY dish soap. When it comes to which essential oils to use, you can basically use anything you want. However, I’d recommend always including some kind of citrus essential oil because the acidity is excellent at cutting through grease.
I’ve also made this recipe using lavender oil, which I used with lemon oil. Just combine equal quantities of each and you’ve got another amazing dish soap. Because all the ingredients are natural, you won’t have to worry about getting dry skin or doing unnecessary damage to the environment.
Realistically, this natural DIY citrus dish soap will be no less effective than conventional dish soaps. That said, you might find it a bit harder to shift stubborn stains, but it’s nothing a bit of elbow grease won’t solve! The way I look at it is this: I’d rather have to work harder to clean my dishes than pump tons of harmful chemicals into the water supply.
By making small changes in our life, such as making our own natural citrus dish soap, we can hopefully move towards a cleaner way of living. If you decide to make this soap recipe and like it, then I’d recommend switching onto other natural and clean household cleaning products. You can rest assured that there’s a recipe out there to replace almost every product. But start with this dish soap and see how you get on first!