4d ago

Whats a useful moneysaving tip you want to share?

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I use soap to clean myself. Every part of myself. Including my hair. Get a good, plain, unscented natural soap—and here I mean soap, not "beauty bar" or other such terminology used to disguise the actual composition—and you'll save oodles of money while avoiding the laurel sulfates that are so damaging to skin. You can even splurge a bit and get an Aleppo soap or any kind of castile soap that's ludicrously expensive for a soap and yet will be cheaper than having:
shampoo
conditioner
rinse
body wash
facial wash
facial rinse
… and a cast of thousands of other expensive products the "beauty" industry foists off on you.
Then there's deodorant. The last deodorant I bought cost me 20 bucks. For a supply that's thus far lasted me five years and is about half-finished. This is because I use alum powder (ground-up alum crystal) as my deodorant. You'll need the extra cost of a spray bottle too, so add a buck or two for the first use. But then it's about 2-3 teaspoons in a 500ml spray bottle every couple of weeks, topped with water. It's 100% unscented, will actually neutralize scents if, say on a really hot day of hard work, your clothes start smelling gamy, and works better than any commercial deodorant I've ever used in my entire life.
(If you want the same product for orders of magnitude more money, you can look up brands like "Crystal Stick" or the like, but you won't be able to neutralize odours on your clothing with it.)
- Is alum powder what the deodorant rocks are? Or are they the same method of clogging sweat glands like aluminum anti perspirant deodorants?
  
  Deodorant rocks are alum crystal. Alum powder is the same stuff ground down to a powder. It is a deodorant, not an anti perspirant. You do not stop sweating when you use alum. It just kills the bacteria that cause the odour (which is why you can use it to temporarily clear the gamy scent of clothing as well).
  
  I have used the crystals for years! Yes, just as you say, they are wonderful in so many ways!
  They don't stain clothes, last seemingly forever, leave no sticky or feeling of residue on the body, keep me odor-free for more that 24h should I forget to reapply.
  I've been reading your other comments with delight. Thank you for informing me about the powder form, I shall seek it out at once! I have found it difficult to buy them locally in the last year and the price online is often insane. I'm also quite the large-handed man so I butterfingers the sticks quite often and they shatter easily due to their brittleness, but ofc I'm to frugal to throw it away so I use the razor-sharp shards until they are small pea-size. Now I can use the powder and have infinite supply mwahahahaha!
  The other great aspect is the odor neutralization aspect you mentioned. I do workout and it's very possible to lose sense of your own cloud of aroma. I've used pet enzyme spray to rid pits of persistent smells that no other cleaner thus far can remove, as (as far as I understand it) they don't break down the stank proteins and molecules like the enzyme. But if this alum powder produces the same result as the enzyme spray, I bow and thank you again. Can't wait to try it.
- I commented elsewhere about the excellent deodorant tip, but about soap... have you tried... not really using soap? Or extremely minimal amounts?
  I stopped effectively using soap on my body about 8 years ago and I'll talk about the reasons later. To refine that a bit more, it takes me about a year to go through one 700mL bottle of body wash. That might conjure immediate thoughts of oily hair, blackheads, greasy complexion, body odor, and so forth. In my personal experience what happened was the exact opposite!
  My persistent flaky skull went away, my bodily psoriasis improved dramatically, my constant accumulation of facial blackheads stopped, acne became a distant memory, frequent earwax plugs stopped, hair became supple and lustrous, skin looked oxygenated and uniform. My whole life shaving left my skin a rosy, seeping, abraded mess and after stopping the soap I can say with no hyperbole I can shave with only water and my skin looks and feels happy and unbothered. My overall stink level probably went down by a factor of 10, no joke.
  This might venture into the realm of kookery somewhat, but I believe humans did not evolve to use soap to the degree it's used overall in society.
  We should use soap, we must use soap. I don't want to cook out of my cast iron that's not been washed out and has sat there with congealing pork gravy for 2 days. There's no problem with soap, but I take issue with whatever 'force' took root sometime in the 50's that made people believe they must obliterate all the scary things everywhere infinity always via it's over-application.
  Edit: To give an example, I don't think we should be washing the oils out of our scalps with soaps. Our scalps made that sebum for a reason. Then we buy products to try to undo the damage of the soap but can we just geodesic this problem and not disturb our scalps in the first place
  Thoughts?
  
  You stink
  
  No.
  The less you wash the less you stink, quite counterintuitively.
  Your body knows what to do. Wash your undercarriage and armpits, and then only a very little bit. Everything else makes you stink worse.
  
  No. You stink.
  
  I used shampoos and body washes. I had all the problems you cited. I switched to soap. They all went away. ("Body wash", you see, is not soap. Nor is shampoo. Nor are "beauty bars" or any of the other terms the "beauty" industry foists off on us as cleansing products.
  The issue, it turns out, is that most "cleansing" products are sodium or potassium (I forget which) laurel sulfate at their core (something that's easier to make at industrial scale and to attach additives like scents and such), and that stuff is horrifically bad for skin in a wide variety of ways. All the other crap we add like "moisturizers" and "conditioners" and "rinses" and such is there to undo the damage that the cleaning product caused in the first place.
  Soap (real soap) is chemically very different and doesn't have the drying and damaging impact on skin that laurel sulfate does.
  
  Yes SLS is your industrial surfactant. But it's just an alcohol molecule I think, hard on skin when used to excess but not inherently bad.
  But even that, I think it's only tangential to my concept though. While the body wash can contain ingredients X, Y, or Z my point was I feel like we likely need 1/50th the amount of bodily cleansing vs the expected norms. I don't think we need to wash most of our bodies outside of our dick and pits, really. Hands obviously for sanitation reasons, the rest largely pointless and actively harmful in my worldview. Even your asshole has its own specialized lubricants that you're really not supposed to industrially strip out of there. Sorry to be graphic lol
- As a former soapmaker, I'll suggest looking for someone in your area making quality soap that you like. Find some great handmade soap and you'll never go back to the commercial crap.
  
  I use nothing but handmade soaps. My main soap is Aleppo soap (from Syria) with a backup soap that's a goat milk soap (from Xinjiang). I occasionally splurge and get some "sugar soap" from Thailand.

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