How We Make Our Body Wash

 
First we start with an organic Castile Liquid soap base. You can buy these for around fifty cents per ounce at places like Swanson Vitamins & Supplements and even Walmart. If it's organic, it's a damn good soap. You can use it all by itself as a face wash, a shampoo, and you can even shave with it.

The companies bottling the soap, because they buy in huge quantities, pay around 10 to 12 cents per ounce. (We measure most things in our business by the ounce just so we're not comparing apples and oranges.) 

Some soaps add essential oils and sometimes Tea Tree. If they buy these in bulk, they get them really cheap. For instance, we've found Tea Tree oil on the web for seven cents an ounce. 

So, here's what it looks like when I've got a big bowl of organic castile soap with our "magical" ingredients just ready to mix up.
The powder you see is our organic, 200X aloe vera. It's aloe vera juice that's been dehydrated, and when re-hydrated, makes 200 times it's volume. To make 16 ounces of water into 16 ounces of aloe vera, you just add half a teaspoon of the powder. I've added enough of the aloe vera concentrate to infuse 96 ounces with it. 

The cream below is Ron Salley's Ultra moisturizer. He keeps telling me he's no longer going to make it because people cannot afford it. It is the best moisturizer on the planet. It has no chemicals and only oils extracted from plants according to Ron's instructions. He demands his oils to be extracted at low temps and in small batches. Thus, he pays top dollar for his ingredients. 

At the end of this, we've some news concerning Ron's Ultra. We're going to carry it again, but with changes. 

Oh, and that jar to see behind to the top left of the picture? That's "my" mangosteen pericarp I use for experimenting with recipes. I just made muffins (banana, chocolate chip, flax) with it. 
Here's a close up of the aloe vera powder. There's the USDA organic symbol there too. 
This is the empty container with Ron's moisturizer. And you will NOT see me throwing this away. For the next few weeks I'll be scraping out the last drops to use on myself and my dry feet. 

Update: my housekeeper just washed it out and put the container away. I've got a great housekeeper, but I forgot to tell her I wasn't through with it yet!!! I love this stuff and I'll use it right to the last drop. 

And as I said, stick around. We've got some news about this stuff.
I use my submersible blender. I blend and blend and blend (then I have to change hands and blend some more). 
As you can see, the additives are slowly disappearing.
Almost there. I've got to make sure that all the aloe is infused and there's no thick cream that submerged and is sitting on the bottom. 
Nearly finished. It's starting to foam up. It's been about half an hour since I started blending.
We're finished blending now and this is where I fill the bottles. As you can see, we over fill them just a hair, because there will be some residual clinging to the measuring cup. I do use a spatula to get most of it out, but I would have needed a third arm to take that picture. 
The bottles hold about 18 ounce and we used to over-fill them. I say used to because recently we had three people write back to us that the bottle opened en-route. (And a warning from the Post Office as well!)

We had wanted to give people extra value for their money, but we ended up giving them an extra mess to clean up. 

I spoke with some reps from the post office and they just told me to stop over-filling and see how that works 

So, all bottles going out in the future will be filled to 16 ounces. We'll add essential oils after that, if you want. But we just don't want exploding soap delivered to our customers' doors.
 
Do you see this bottle in my hand? There are only two of these bottles in existence, and as you can see I have one. 

This is eight ounces Ron's Ultra Créme moisturizer. It retails for $128.00. That's $16 per ounce. 

At my other site, I once wrote a paper comparing this to the high buck La Mer moisturizing cream that sells for $170.00 per ounce. 

In that paper I pointed out all the toxic ingredients, but now I don't have to. I'm going to let the Environmental Working Group do that for me.
These are thermometer graphs. The higher the temp, the more toxic. 

Ron Salley's moisturizer is completely and utterly non toxic. You can even drink it. 

Ron does NOT buy his ingredients from "suppliers." He buys them from companies that will extract/create his ingredients according to his instructions. They are created at low temps (so as not to destroy the beneficial constituents) in small batches (ensuring a complete process that loses nothing). 

I talked to Ron this morning and he told he he's having a hell of a time filling these 8 oz bottles because his moisturizer is so thick. We are trying to figure out a way to do this, and we might have to "thin" the cream. That would bring the price down a bit. 

There are other things we can try.

But for now, this is the only way he will sell his Ultra Créme from now on. And he is working out a great price for our customers. 

It's going to be higher (a lot higher) than the moisturizers you buy at WalMart that you need to use daily because their ingredients dry your skin. 

I gave a gal a Christmas present of this way back when, and six months later I visited her. In her bathroom, where she applied it after a shower, I found her bottle. It was still half full. 

This is a true moisturizer. Once you've weened yourself off those drying creams and start using this, you don't have to use it daily. 

It is simply the best damn moisturizer on the planet.