Natural Hair and Body Care on the Cheap - Sugar Scrub Your Way into Savings

There is a strong correlation between being more environmentally conscious and saving a penny. Natural hair and body care products are expensive, usually three times the price of a conventional counterpart. What to do if you desire natural products but do not care to raise your beauty budget? There are cheap and natural concoctions that you can make at home, right over the kitchen sink.

HAIR

There are two methods for cleaning straight hair that are cheap and natural:

Baking soda scrub with vinegar or lemon rinse. Take about 1/4 cup baking soda in a small jar (leftover baby food jar to small jam jar is a good choice) and mix with equal part HOT water (it will cool off considerably). If you have dandruff or scalp issues, a drop of tea tree oil is beneficial and if you have dry hair or dry scalp two tsp honey or molasses mixed in works too. You actually use BOTH additions and prefer the molasses to the honey, but molasses is the cheaper of the two. Shake all of the combined ingredients together; wet your hair thoroughly - cannot stress wet head enough! - and then pour combined (nectar thick in viscosity) mixture onto your SCALP and rub gently all over your scalp. Try to focus on the crown and borders, especially behind the ears, as that is where build-up occurs. Smooth what you can through the rest of your hair but the stands are not too much of the focus. Rinse out well, the rinsing take more time than if you were using a traditional shampoo. After you are rinsed your hair may feel very dry and like straw - this is because the PH balance is very off. Now take about 1/4 cup of apple cider vinegar, red wine vinegar, white vinegar or lemon juice (basically, an acid) and mix with 24 to 32 oz warm water. Shake well and douse head thoroughly. You can use a quart Mason jar for this but recycled shampoo and conditioner bottles allow more control over getting the rinse onto your head. Use your hands to work it in and then rinse THOROUGHLY with warm water.