Skip to main content

Brands vs Homemade

Image
By Helen Lee Gray

As a marketer I like my brands, Colgate, Revlon, Lenor all work for me, I get the brand investment, the brand identity the money it takes to make and maintain a brand.   I also understand that these are multi-national companies, who don’t really care about you or me other than the £s we spend, that no-doubt the amount of washing liquid going into our rivers and seas are polluting the water, that the chemicals used to make my hair soft or the oil to come out of my trousers are probably not the best for me and the environment.

With this in mind, and the promise of a really great lunch, I went for a workshop on how to make your own soaps, lip balms, washing liquid and toothpaste at Qunita da Fonte this weekend.

Our expert, Emma, took us through the processes, with her box of essential oil goodies.



Laundry liquid – easy.   Melt natural soap with water.   Let is set until it looks like jelly. 

Soap – who knew it contained caustic soda?  I didn’t.    Mix the stuff together with water, watch it fizz, add flavours, mix until it looks like mayonnaise.  Leave for three weeks for all the awful caustic soda to be expelled.  

I find home-made soap goes very sticky very quickly, but we were told that the bought soaps are made in exactly the same way, but are salted until all the oils come out of them, this is what makes them so drying to your skin. 

Toothpaste – green clay, glycerine and salt.   It is green, it remains green, it’s green when you brush your teeth.   It tastes like green toothpaste.   Basically it’s green.  I tried it last night not sure I liked it. 

Lip-balm – get a block of what looks like parmesan, it’s not, it’s beeswax.   




Melt oil, melt wax add essential oils….




that is so easy even I will have another go at it.  I flavored mine with a little too much basil essential oil so basically I smell like a salad!  But it is very simple and I think would make a great present for people.  I think I might just try this one at home. 

 So, I am not completely sold on the idea of making it all yourself, after all I always wanted to be Margot when it came to the Good Life.   But combine all of this new knowledge with a fantastic lunch, meeting some new people and a few glasses of red wine and I think this was a great day out!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Building our Barrel Vault Wood Fired Oven

By
This is a short description of my barrel vault build that I have done here in Central Portugal. The final internal size is a 1m squared floor with a arch height of 50cm. I hope you enjoy and get some ideas from it. I wish to thank ukwoodfiredovenforum  for their advice and support. • 1: First I dug out a hole in the flower bed, on top of the stone wall, where the oven was to be built • 2: Set up a form to pour in the concrete base • 3: Pour the concrete base, which was about 5-6 inches deep • 4: On top of the base I cast 4-5 inches of LECA (light weight expanded clay balls) mixed with cement to hold it's form • 5: Then I cast a 2-3 inch heat retaining base, to add to the thermal mass, using calcium aluminate cement with large grain sand, as a flat base for the hearth bricks to sit on • 6-8: I then dry laid the hearth bricks on a dry bed of fine sand and clay mixture, with th
1 comment
Read more

Read the signs

By Helen Lee Gray
In 2009/10 there was a brief outcry in the UK about the amount of unnecessary road signs on British roads.   The consumer group called Civic Choice submitted information that there were tens of thousands of excess road signs and that too many signs were confusing and distracting.    The AA results of a survey can be found here and the Campaign for Plain English also supported some of the findings. I think this problem has ‘gone global’, well at least ‘gone European’ OK maybe just ‘gone Portuguese’.   There is certainly a road sign disease spreading on the IC8, one of the major highways in Central Portugal.   This disease seems to have reached its peak in the area between the turn off for the IC3 and Castanheira de Pera.   The disease is spreading, the spores of signs scattering along the roadside and new signs growing all the time.   In this short distance, it takes just 10 mins to drive, it has been reported to me that there are a whopping 400 plus signs.   I tried
Post a Comment
Read more

oh what a lovely bougainvillea

By Helen Lee Gray
It was something I wanted to grow, a plant which would cover the wall, give shade, give colour and really stamp the fact we lived abroad.   Bougainvillea. We have the other Mediterranean type of plants growing; we have olives in abundance, we have the grapes thriving, we have the figs establishing, but alas no bougainvillea.    I looked up how to grow it and it says:   Bougainvillea thrives in full sun.   “At least 5 hours a day of direct sunlight is the minimal light required for good bloom. More hours of direct sun are better. Less than 5 hours and the plant may not bloom very well.”   5 hours of sun ‘check’, good light ‘check’, south facing ‘check’….but alas the Med we are not!   This little peak of Central Portugal has cold air in winter (snow even), a vigorous breeze at dusk and is prone to a late frost.   Our courtyard is just too exposed to the elements, there is no little ‘nook’ for a bougainvillea, there is no wall for it to climb up.   So, after a courageous start in
2 comments
Read more