home made baby wash

[justy421]

ok, i have been looking all over the internet for a recipe to make my own baby wash/shampoo and i cannot find ANYTHING!! does anyone have a good recipe? a baby lotion recipe would be appreciated also. Thank you. :

[Tilia]

Hmm, we just use Burt's Bees baby wash, so I can't help you there.

But for lotion, I use jojoba oil or unrefined coconut oil. They start out greasy but soak in quickly.

[Robert Goodman]

Originally Posted by justy421

ok, i have been looking all over the internet for a recipe to make my own baby wash/shampoo and i cannot find ANYTHING!! does anyone have a good recipe?

Depends what you're willing to start with, what processes you're willing to use, and what characteristics you want the product to have. Just taking a guess at all of these things based on context, the short though admittedly presumptuous answer is "no". If you give enough details on your criteria and we engage in a lot of back-and-forth Q&A, you have a slight chance of getting a useful answer different from "no". Sorry.

I can sell you a gallon of liquid that you might call baby wash/shampoo, but it's not zero eye sting. It'll sting less than soap, has no fragrance, coloring, etc. You can e-mail me for details. You can add some ingredients of your own, and then it's homemade like cake from cake mix!

But you can say that last bit about a lot of things. Buy baby wash, "doctor" it, and it's "my own".

Robert

[Robert Goodman]

I was asked privately about this, but I don't feel like giving a detailed response for one person at a time so I'll post more here. Having some experience with forums on related subjects such as soapmaking, I'm trying to anticipate questions and resolve them. It's a FAQ, but not a frequently answered one.

What's so hard about making baby shampoo or baby wash? First we have to ask what "making" means. When hobbyists refer to making soap, they usually mean doing a chemical synthesis, involving a chemical reaction that changes the starting materials into what is sometimes referred to as another molecular entity. However, some hobbyists will also refer to simply molding soap (i.e. changing its shape, usually via a melt-&-pour kit) as "making" soap; it was already soap, but you made it into a cake or whatever. Other people might exclude a mere change of shape, but consider the making of a mixture of ingredients (without any subsequent chemical rxn) to be making a product, the way we might make salad dressing.

Next I have to ask what makes a baby wash or a baby shampoo a baby wash or shampoo. I think to most people it's the unusual property (compared to soap or similar products) of not stinging eyes. Otherwise washing a baby is just like washing an adult, unless you have something else in mind differentiating baby from adult cleaning products.

No-eye-sting shampoo consists of a mixture of surfactants which are detergent (which is just a synonym for "cleaning") but, in combination, don't sting eyes at the concentrations usually used. To do that, the mixtures are of surfactants which are all less irritating in combination than soap (often the combinations are less irritating than most of the individual ingredients, for reasons unknown) and in addition include certain surfactants which, in sufficient proportion, prevent eye sting by other surfactants. The anti-sting surfactants are all nonionic surfactants produced by ethoxylation of certain synthetic glycolipids and/or monoglycerides. These are different from, but share some similarity with, the anesthetic surfactants that are ethoxylated alcohols or alkylphenols. The anti-eye-sting surfactants are not without controversy.

All of these surfactants are considerably harder to synthesize than are soaps; or, to put it another way, soaps are by far the easiest surfactants to synthesize from readily available materials, which is why soapmaking was discovered centuries before the other surfactants were. I don't know of any DIYers who are making baby shampoo style surfactants in that "making" sense.

That leaves the possibility of making baby shampoo by simply mixing ingredients, which is the way even most commercial makers of baby shampoo do it. (They buy surfactants synthesized by others.) Yes, you can do that. You can look at the labels on commercial baby products and get those ingredients. However, it's hard to get the ingredients in quantities small enough to be suitable to DIY.

On top of that, I'd expect most readers here, if they wanted to make their own baby wash or baby shampoo, to want it to be in some way different from the commercial kind. Usually they want it to be "natural", which AFAICT is really a synonym for old fashioned. Sorry, but baby shampoo is by its nature high tech stuff, a product of the last half century, at least if you go by the no-eye-sting criterion. As I wrote above, if you have some other criterion in mind, then maybe we can work on it. Or who knows, maybe one of you can discover something new that takes the eye sting out of soap.

Robert

[snanna]

For baby soap/shampoo: warm water.

For baby lotion: coconut or sweet almond oil. Or shea butter for face.

Not really recipes, I admit, but simple, cheap and effective!

[lovemyfamily6]

Originally Posted by snanna

For baby soap/shampoo: warm water.

For baby lotion: coconut or sweet almond oil. Or shea butter for face.

Not really recipes, I admit, but simple, cheap and effective!

:

[Ruthla]

Originally Posted by snanna

For baby soap/shampoo: warm water.

For baby lotion: coconut or sweet almond oil. Or shea butter for face.

Not really recipes, I admit, but simple, cheap and effective!

I was just going to suggest this- babies don't really get all that dirty, and plain water gets off toddler stickies quite well.

If you need a little more cleaning power once in a while, a small amount of mild bar soap sudsed up with lots of water works quite well.

If ypu want an "all natural baby bath" to use on adults or stinkier older kids, I'd suggest going with a simple natural soap and use in moderation.

[Robert Goodman]

There is a recipe commonly given out there for homemade baby wipes, but it assumes you have baby shampoo to start with.

[utopia760]

baby shampoo actully has a numbing agent in it so it does not sting eyes so its really not "gentle" it just numbs them SICK HU

[sphinxie]

You could add a little orange blossom, rose or lavender floral water to the warm water to make it even nicer.

[Robert Goodman]

Originally Posted by utopia760

baby shampoo actully has a numbing agent in it so it does not sting eyes so its really not "gentle" it just numbs them SICK HU

No, it doesn't exactly numb them; it's not anesthetic. Under its influence, the cornea still has feeling, unlike what happens when the type of nonionics including nonoxynol-9 (also used in spermicide) get into it.

However, what's the point of "baby shampoo" if it doesn't have anything to counteract eye sting? Is there anything else you can think of that distinguishes baby shampoo or baby wash from just plain shampoo or body wash?

There have been some products called "baby bath" that were/are labeled as being usable either as a wash or by mixing with bath water. Usually they have a formula similar or identical to those of baby wash, but as to the latter use -- mixing with bath water -- I think the anti-eye-sting ingredients would be superfluous, because then it'd be too dilute to sting eyes. Unfortunately I think the product would then also be too dilute to clean skin any better than plain water! (Johnson's once said of their baby bath, "It certainly cleans better than plain water alone." But their loophole, I'm sure, was that that's if you use it as a wash, not a bath water additive.) So what effect does it accomplish if you use it that way? Well, now they have some that deliver aromatherapy like that, in which case the other ingredients are just a vehicle, or they can be used to foam the water, i.e. as bath foam ("bubble" bath). Only thing is, I don't think babies are of such sophistication as to appreciate the foam the way children do -- babies are still trying to figure out water -- so what it really does is provide a cute sight for their parents or older siblings. But I've found that when you foam up even some very mild products, the foam (though not the water under it) can sting eyes. In that respect my own patented formula is superior, in that it makes a wet foam that doesn't sting eyes even though it has no anti-eye-sting baby shampoo ingredients.

All that is a roundabout way to find an excuse to call something a name similar to "baby wash" that would be worthwhile to make as a homemade alternative material. In that sense I can be said to have made a homemade baby bath. (It's really just a non-irritating yet very densely foaming bath foam that children love.)

Robert

[alnoodle]

Ok, so my daughter is allergic to I swear everything under the sun. So I've been experiementing with natural baby washes. I am currently using Castile soap with olive oil and oatmeal. Seems to have cleared up her rash?!

[Robert Goodman]

Originally Posted by alnoodle

Ok, so my daughter is allergic to I swear everything under the sun. So I've been experiementing with natural baby washes. I am currently using Castile soap with olive oil and oatmeal. Seems to have cleared up her rash?!

Was she able to tolerate just plain soap?

For just plain babies (i.e. not allergic to near everything), why not just plain soap? Is there an assumption out there these days that you need a specialized liquid product for washing babies? Maybe that's why major brands of soap no longer model babies using them, the way Ivory, Palmolive, and Dial did when I was little (and later Safeguard when it came out) -- now they'd rather sell you a fancy liquid.

Robert

[alnoodle]

Originally Posted by Robert Goodman

Was she able to tolerate just plain soap?

For just plain babies (i.e. not allergic to near everything), why not just plain soap? Is there an assumption out there these days that you need a specialized liquid product for washing babies? Maybe that's why major brands of soap no longer model babies using them, the way Ivory, Palmolive, and Dial did when I was little (and later Safeguard when it came out) -- now they'd rather sell you a fancy liquid.

Robert

nah she's got Excema really bad. Rash all over... had to go all natural on laundry soap too. DR says soaps and detergents tend to make baby excema worse than it already is or something. Anyway... like I said... this mixture that I made up seems to work well for her. And I am sure you will ask why not just plain water... well... the excema has actually become raw at some points and if you do not clean excema good.. it gets infected. I have it as well.. but I am not quite as sensitve as she is to stuff. Anyway, just a suggestion for people looking for really sensitive baby soap. It's cheap and effective. However, anyone who choses to use a soap like this... you use very little... only a few drops because not much is needed. It becomes more like a soak after you wash them.