I’ve recently decided to make my own shampoo instead of buying those chemical laced ones. I checked online but some are a "bit much". Anyone know how to make a homemade shampoo with herbs and anything else natural?
Shampoo is really just a detergent that has added ingredients to moisturize, maintain pH, adjust the viscosity, and prevent bacteria from growing. Some also contain color and fragrance.
If you want to make your own out of only "natural" chemicals, you will have a very difficult time. Surfactants (that’s the technical name for a detergent) are hard to come by in nature. You could buy a cactus, extract it with warm (not hot) water, and isolate a group of chemicals called saponins. That will be your starting point for the detergent, it’s a natural foaming agent. However, two things will cause you problems: First, the extract is dark, most people don’t like putting dark liquids on their head. Second, it can foul up your blood chemistry should it be absorbed into the skin. It has been known to be fatal. But it is natural, and you (and many others) seem to feel that all natural products are automatically good for the body.
Second, you need to preserve your shampoo against bacteria, otherwise within about a week you’ll have a bottle of bacteria. Most bacteriastats and preservatives are synthetic unfortunately. You could reduce the pH of your shampoo to <3 with natural citric acid and bacteria won’t grow in it. However, that is likely to cause severe scalp irritation. It is said that lavender oil is a natural preservative, but in that respect it doesn’t work all that well, and lavender oil itself is made up of, well, many different chemicals, which you don’t want.
You could use herbs to scent your product, that’s a good idea and it may work. But first you have to extract the oils from the herbs and if you want it to be all natural, you have to be careful how you do it. Putting the herbs in boiling water would work well, but unfortunately, that’s not allowed if you’re going to call it natural. You could let it sit with the water in the sunlight and that would work. But it would probably take many months. Extracting the herbs with alsohol would work well too, but watch out for the type of alcohol you use. Most is synthetically made, and that would void any natural claims. And you’d have to distill off the alcohol anyway, you don’t want that in your product.
Color? Really not necessary, but you could use red from strawberries or beets. Blueberries only give a purple color. But make sure you don’t extract out natural sugars with it, they don’t work together well in shampoos. There are ways you could remove the sugars, but all of them would be considered non-natural procedures so you couldn’t use them. Don’t use the food colorings found in supermarkets. They would work well, but they’re not natural.
Surfactants will naturally remove protective oils from your scalp, so it would be best to include some natural moisturizers in your shampoo to keep from getting a nasty case of dandruff. Unfortunately, aside from adding natural mineral oil (which may not be very soluble in your mixture) there are few natural moisturizers to be found.
The only thing left is to see how you like your finished product. It may be too watery in which case you may need to thicken it. Many of the chemicals you see on ingredient labels are there for that purpose. But those are not natural. You could try adding natural salt, sometimes that works. Sometimes it doesn’t.
Good luck with your project!