Make your own hairspray

Here’s my latest trick:

Confession – I’ve been using homemade hairspray for a week. It actually works and doesn’t take a degree in chemistry to figure it out either.

Here’s what you need: water, sugar and a spray bottle. That’s it – regular ol’ white sugar.

The formula is one cup of just simmering water and 4 tsps. of sugar. Stir it together until the sugar is dissolved and pour it in a bottle when it’s cool enough. I added 2-3 drops of lemon essential oil because I felt like being girly. I bought a tiny travel bottle to store mine in, so my ratio was 1/4 cup water and 1 tsp. sugar.

If you want the hair spray stronger, add more sugar. Want something less than Aqua Net? Add more water. I would say this is a medium hold. It’s enough to keep my bangs in place and frizz tamed, but this would need to be a lot stronger for an up-do or something with a lot of volume. It’s very flexible and isn’t sticky. It’s not an immediate set if that’s important to you in a hairspray.

Most of you country girls are thinking that this is love potion for bees and other insects. It doesn’t seem to be. I sprayed it on my hair and went outside to pull weeds for about an hour and didn’t have a single bug bother me. And trust me, the bees were around.

My only dilemma is this – I found this idea on another blog about a month ago that I forgot to bookmark and now can’t find to save my life. I did comment on the post. If that was your blog, please let me know so I can give you credit! I apologize for having a redhead moment.

Homemade shampoo, fail #1

It was Friday night. I had free time (first time all week!) and needed to get creative to decompress from a very stressful week. So, just like the last time I got bored and whipped up dish soap, I decided to make shampoo. This is something I’ve wanted to try for awhile since I’ve started making my own bar soap.

I’ve had one recipe bookmarked for awhile, but I found another on about.com that I decided to try instead. You can find it here. The ingredients were pretty simple – water, soap, olive oil, gylcerin and any essential oil for fragrance (I used peppermint). I grated up an old trial-size bar of Burt’s Bees Peppermint Shower Soap to use that I’ve had for years instead of using my homemade soap just in case this turned out to be a bomb.

Call it premonition, but this stuff was a bomb. Maybe it was soap I used, maybe it was because I used tap water instead of distilled, or maybe it was because I didn’t shake it up well enough before applying, but it’s a bomb.

This morning my hair feels like I haven’t washed it in two weeks. It’s beyond gummy and will stick straight up on its own if I move it to do so. It’s so bad my husband even commented that it it looked like crap. He even suggested that I hang on to this homemade stuff and save it for Halloween because it gave me great scary witch hair. Sax Guy never notices anything new about my hair. I could whack it off five inches and he probably still wouldn’t notice.

I had bad feelings about this stuff last night in the shower while I was trying to wash my hair. It made my hair gummy when I applied it, but I figured that would wash out. The tangles it gave me were murder! I tried to rinse it out, then I applied an apple cider vinegar rinse (one cup water, 1 Tbsp. vinegar) to help cut the grease. That did help immensely and made it pretty easy to comb through once I was out of the shower, but that feeling left as soon as I let it air dry.

Here’s one thing that was surprising once my hair dried – I had small curls. Now, until about five years ago, my hair was naturally curly. It’s just below my shoulders and would curl in fabulous ringlets on its own. Now, I just have a little wave and I have to fight to get that. It just does not curl anymore. Seeing curls again gave me motivation to find a better shampoo recipe.

I found an article on instructables.com that has several recipes for different shampoo recipes. The basic shampoo recipe is 1/4 cup liquid castile soap, 1/4 cup water, and 1/2 of oil like jojoba or grapeseed. This is the recipe I’ve had bookmarked for awhile to try, and is going to be the formula I try next.

If you’ve got a shampoo recipe that worked for you, or have some ideas as to what I did wrong or tips to make it better, please let me know!