Recipes for Clean & Green Home Cleansers

Named after the medieval Spanish city of Castile, this kind of soap was the first widespread cleanser for people, who before this were famously dirty, as well as diseased. It is made quite simply by mixing olive oil with lye, a naturally occurring caustic agent, which splits the oil into castile soap and glycerin, in a process called saponification. No lye remains in the final product. Castile soap can include other oils that form bubbles a bit more easily than just olive oil, but we’ve found the best results for foaming come from using a self-foaming bottle.

If your soap is foaming up easily by itself, it most likely contains an industrial detergent (surfactant) like sodium lauryl sulfate (SLS). Surfactants are excellent for completely suspending oils so they can be rinsed away and SLS was developed for heavy duty use. On the skin, it is known to irritating and drying. Our skin actually functions much better when it’s properly moisturized by our own oil supply (called sebum). If we continually strip all our oils, we confuse our oil glands into over-production (happens with great frequency with our faces and hair oil glands), or fail to be able to maintain healthy skin (which happens often to our hands, which have fewer oil glands). Ever noticed how dry and cracked your hands become in the winter? Or how you can end up with flakey skin that’s somehow also oily? Your soap may be the culprit.

Germ fighting ingredients our Clean & Green Hand and Home Cleansing products:

Sweet orange (antiseptic), eucalyptus (traditional disinfectant), rosemary (antibacterial), cedar (antifungal), lavender (insecticide), lemon (antibacterial), and tea tree essential oils (antiviral) make a hearty germ-fighting team. And they happen to smell heavenly as well.

Make your own home cleansers using our potent Clean & Green Collection for anti-germ power and simple ingredients you find in your cupboard.