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A step forward in haircare

I only wash my hair with water (and scrubbing!), which works well with soft water. If you have hard water, though, dissolved minerals bind to sebum in your hair to form a weird sticky white residue. Super unpleasant! It makes your hair oddly stiff. The only solution I’d found in the past was to occasionally (maybe once a month) wash with normal shampoo.

But I just had a breakthrough! Some people claim that washing with cold or cool water keeps your hair nicer (for unknown reasons). Between this and the fact that cold hard water in particular should have fewer dissolved minerals, I decided to try washing my hair with cold water (but take an otherwise hot shower). I wash my hair as the water is warming up.

It works amazingly well! The cold water even reversed previous mineral buildup. My hair is silky and soft without being greasy. It’s not stiff, it’s not sticky. Even my skeptical mom says that it feels nice!

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Speaking of food waste…

If you have food that’s going to go bad or that you think you won’t use, what do you do with it?

If you want to eat the food yourself:

  • Eat it before it goes bad, quick!
  • Ignore expiration dates! They are unregulated except on medication and baby food (and even then don’t mean much. 90% of medications retain nearly their entire efficacy 10 years after the expiration date. Even the military ignores expiration dates to save loads of money!). If it looks fine, smells fine, and, finally, tastes fine, then it is probably fine.
  • Freeze it. Many things can be frozen without harm to their taste or texture. This includes raw and cooked meat, purportedly hard cheeses (never tried this myself!), tomato sauce, broth, cooked beans, whole and sliced bread and other baked goods, dry goods (flour, dry beans, spices, etc if you’re worried about rancidity or loss of flavor), and more! Many veggies can be blanched and then frozen.
  • Preserve it. There are many preservation methods to try! You can can, dehydrate, salt, ferment, smoke, or pickle. For example, turn milk into kefir or yogurt. Ferment cabbage into kimchi or sauerkraut. Smoke fish. Make jam.

If you are sick and tired of a particular food:

  • Take it to work to share with colleagues! Alternatively, share with friends and neighbors. This works especially well if you’re trying to get rid of desserts and snack foods.
  • On a similar note, have a potluck.
  • Give it away! You can do this on Freecycle or Craigslist (there is an area for free things under the sale section). There is also Olio, a food-sharing app for smart phones, soon to have a web app as well. Unfortunately, it isn’t as widely-used as Freecycle and Craigslist. I believe Olio is European in origin, so it is widespread in Europe. Amazingly, people also use it in Northern California! Lucky!
  • Feed it to pets. My grandparents always fed their cats table scraps.
  • Feed it to animals you’re going to eat (e.g. pigs or chickens).
  • Feed it to wild animals. Although not good to do frequently, at least some living being gets to eat it.
  • Compost it and use the compost to grow something else!
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Wasted!

There’s a new food waste documentary out! It’s called Wasted! and features Anthony Bourdain, a food show celebrity who apparently has a cult following.

The documentary is well-produced and covers familiar as well as unfamiliar ground. I’d say that the overall message is familiar, but the details and anecdotes are interesting and illuminating.

Did you know that people in Seoul, South Korea, pay by weight to throw away their food waste? And Japan has a food-waste-saving pig-feeding operation. That’s pretty neat! Japanese pork producers have been experimenting with what combinations of types of food waste (e.g. veggies and fruits, but no grain) to feed pigs to get the best flavor.

And it takes about 25 years for a head of lettuce to decompose in a landfill D: Not neat. So don’t waste food! If you’re not going to eat it, give it away or feed it to a pet. And make sure to take advantage of composting in your area! If you have a yard, start a compost pile. Maybe your city collects compost, maybe there’s a community garden near you that has a compost pile. Lots of options! Some people even keep worm bins in their apartments.

You can rent the documentary various places online. See the website for details!

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More hair soap for C

Since I had J’s handy-dandy digital scale available (my parents only have a poorly-calibrated analog postal scale), I decided to make yet more soap, this time focusing on better hair soap for sibling C.

The first bar soap I made was 100% tallow, about 5% superfat (in excess of the saponification stoichiometric ratio), with some amount of sodium hydroxide. The lather is thick and creamy, but not voluminous or stable.

To attempt to fix this, the new bar of soap was made with mostly tallow (since I can get this locally, cheaply, and fairly sustainably- it’s considered a waste product of meat production), some coconut oil (supposed to make cleansing soap), and some hemp (because I had it on hand). I used sodium hydroxide again because I wanted to make bar soap (and I don’t have KOH).

Here is the full recipe, made using SoapCalc. There are other soap calculators, but SoapCalc has a whole bunch of pre-loaded oils so you can easily play around with your soap’s properties (how hard, cleansing, moisturizing, etc it is).

The soap seemed to turn out fine. It’s curing now. I used my dad’s 40-year-old pH paper (left over from his days in grad school) to make sure the saponification reaction proceeded as expected.

I like the puck shape. Bars with square edges are so uncomfortable to hold. I molded the soap in plastic take-out cups, the taper of which caused the pucks to have slightly different diameters.
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Trying to make shaving soap

I made a previous batch of tallow-based bar soap (in January) that turned out fairly well. In fact, sibling C swears by it for washing her hair! Interestingly, hair washed with the soap feels very similar to hair habitually washed with only water. The soap is just okay for shaving, though, so I’ve been wanting to do a second improved batch.

The internet says to use a lot of stearic acid to make better shaving soap. Stearic acid makes stable lather, but it is a palm-oil derivative, so definitively not sustainable. However I discovered that soy wax, that is, fully-hydrogenated soy bean oil, can be used as a substitute for stearic acid. So I was planning on buying that until I discovered that… people sell everything on eBay! So I ended up buying “used” stearic acid (from someone who used to make their own lotions).

Apparently, there are tons of things that can go wrong with soap. It seems like most of them only happen when you try to do fancy things (e.g. coloring, fragrance, milk) and I haven’t done those particular things.

However, the combination of stearic acid (very high melting point), tallow (grass-fed from the farmer’ market! moderately high melting point), and sodium hydroxide (used to make hard/bar soap, as compared to potassium hydroxide, which is used to make liquid/soft soap) makes extremely hard soap. It’s super crumbly now that it is completely hardened… On the bright side, the harder the soap, the longer it lasts.

I used SoapCalc to formulate the final recipe. Don’t try to replicate this soap; I’m including the recipe for reference purposes only! You could try the same proportions of oils and use KOH instead of NaOH, that might work.

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I made the lotion!

I made the lotion. The recipe yielded about two cups. I ended up using a KitchenAid stand mixer with the whisk attachment, in place of the advised blender. I don’t think hand-whisking would work.

Looks a lot like mayonnaise.

I substituted water for the aloe vera gel (found some pre-owned on eBay, but it was too expensive. I bought some fresh as a second resort but had trouble extracting the pulp, then tried to eat it so it wouldn’t go to waste and found it incredibly bitter…). I used sweet almond oil for the liquid oil, coconut for the solid, and left out the lanolin (you can also buy this pre-owned on eBay).

The product is very appealing! Lightweight, similar to commercial lotion, and much less greasy than just using plain oil. I plan to make future batches. The addition of aloe vera and lanolin can only make it better! I will probably use shea butter in place of the coconut oil so that the lotion can be used on the face without fear of it causing acne.

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More junk mail

I’m at my parents’ house for the winter holiday season, and there’s a lot more junk mail here than I’m used to!

From CartoonStock.

Today I unsubscribed from Valpak (a bunch of coupons for items my family doesn’t buy), Shen Yun (that Chinese dance troupe that advertises everywhere), and Trader Joe’s Fearless Flyer (we don’t shop at Trader Joe’s). The links I’ve included go to the unsubscribe page for each company (scroll down for Trader Joe’s. There is an “Unsubscribe” section). It could certainly be easier to unsubscribe, but at least larger companies have online tools for this kind of thing. It doesn’t take as long as calling everyone separately.

Here‘s the online form for redplum, another excessive coupon packet.

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Lotion recipe

This lotion doesn’t need to be stored in the fridge, unless you will consume it slowly or you used ingredients that tend to go rancid quickly. The texture is light and quickly-absorbed, much like commercial lotions, so it’s a good option if you don’t like the greasy feeling of using oils straight.

This recipe is adapted from Rosemary Gladstar’s book Herbal Recipes for Vibrant Health. I learned about the book from a low-waste Youtuber who gushed about all the cool recipes in the book. This was the only one I was interested in; I’ve been looking a long time for a lotion recipe that produces something like commercial lotion.

Waters

2/3 cup water

1/3 cup aloe vera

1% citric acid by weight (optional, acts as a preservative for the aloe vera)

Oils

3/4 cup liquid oil (I use sweet almond oil. Other skin-friendly oils, such as sunflower or jojoba, will work, although shelf-stable ones are ideal. Hemp oil, for example, would necessitate refrigeration.)

1/3 cup solid oil (coconut oil, cocoa butter, shea butter, etc)

1/4 tsp lanolin (optional)

1/2-1 oz beeswax

  1. Melt oils together. Let cool to room temperature, until thickened.
  2. In a blender on high, slowly add the waters to the oils. It is done when combined, thickened, and fluffy. The blender will probably start having trouble!

Substitutions

If you are going to use this on your face, use only oils with low comedogenic ratings! That means don’t use coconut oil or cocoa butter. Shea butter, on the other hand, is non-comedogenic and is very unlikely to cause acne. Sunflower, jojoba, and hemp oils are all non-comedogenic, but there are many other liquid oils to choose from.

I haven’t actually made this yet, and I’m planning on whisking it by hand. It may not be possible, but wish me luck!