How to make natural homemade Laundry Detergent

Now, wait a second. Before telling me “I don’t have time for this”, let me tell you my story. I work in the fragrance industry. To be more precise, my day job is to create perfumes for beauty care products. This is why friends and family often come to me asking about the best product to buy. Being a chemist and with my 10-year-experience in this field, I know some things.
So why do I want to tell you how to make your own natural laundry detergent at home?

It is true that many people suffer from allergies or intolerances. Some products might give you a rash, others don’t. Needless to say, the more ingredients a product has, the riskier it is to be intolerant to one of them.

Also, many of these ingredients come from petrochemistry, they are quite toxic to the environment. In the end, all used water goes back into the ocean (or into your local water treatment facility). This means that all the ingredients you have added by washing your body, dishes or clothes, will go back into nature. Just think about it…

Anyway, laundry detergent is important for your household. But it is also heavy to carry back from the supermarket and it is expensive here in France (yes home care and beauty care products cost like double or triple than in Germany for example).

Maybe for you, the reason is none of the above. Maybe you just have more time at your hands during the Corona crisis. And you want to learn how to do things yourself.

Whatever your reason, it is definitely a good one.

What, you are still saying – I don’t have time for this, Aline! I’m a mom.
I get it, so am I. But really, it only takes 10 minutes. Five to assemble your ingredients and another five to make the water boil. And one bag of soap chips will last for 200 circles. You will need to buy it 10 times less often than your common laundry detergent.

So here you go for the recipe I have been using.

My natural homemade laundry detergent

Ingredients:

30g of Marseille soap chips (curd soap) – ECOCERT
1 liter of water
1 TS of baking soda
5 ml of perfume oil
(no vinegar!)

Find out more about these ingredients here: Ingredients for your homemade natural laundry detergent.

Where to buy these ingredients:

You can find them in bigger supermarkets as well as shops for natural products like Naturalia or Bio C Bon.

Recipe for your natural homemade laundry detergent:

Dissolve 30g of Marseille soap chips in a bowl with 1 liter of boiling water. After 15 min you can transfer the mixture into a bottle. Since I am a mom and I don’t have time, I dissolve the soap chips directly in my old laundry detergent bottle.
Add 1 tablespoon of baking soda to the warm but not hot mix. And if you like, add some fragrance. If you are using an essential oil, make sure you don’t use anything you are allergic to and don’t add more than 5ml to 1L of laundry detergent.
Once the mixture is cold, it kind of solidifies.
Shake it and it becomes liquid again.

Done!

See, that wasn’t so hard. And if you don’t like the aspect of this slimey mixture, you can dilute it with another liter of cold water.

Quantity to use

If you made 1 liter, you can add 50g to each machine. For me this is 1 filled plug. In case you have diluted it again, use the double.

If you are interested in learning how to make your own fabric softener, check out my blog post here!

Now, I’m curious, how did it work for you? Are you satisfied? Are you using a different recipe? Hit the comment button and let me know.