Making a homemade Castile Soap shampoo has had its ups and downs but in the end, it was a great life decision. In our process to be eco-friendly, have less waste, use less plastic, use fair trade, and use products not tested on animals, finding a shampoo became quite difficult.

We had bought some Castile Soap a while back for our DIY cleaners and saw on the bottle that shampoo was one of the many uses. Thus began our Castile soap shampoo adventure.

You might ask why you need a recipe for Castile Soap Shampoo. Initially, we thought “okay, we just put it in our hair and voila”.

Nope. This does not work.

Using Castile soap right out of the bottle makes for a very sudsy shampoo but once your hair is dry, it is a stringy mess. It looked like we had not showered for days and you could feel what seemed like build up all over your hair.

After a quick look at the internet, we learned we did it all wrong. Now we have an ACTUAL recipe for Castile soap shampoo and a full understanding of what works best for us.

After trying different options for a DIY shampoo this is what worked best for us. It's easy to use and cleans our hair.

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Ingredients for Our DIY Shampoo

• Liquid Castile soap
• Water
• Essential oil

Instructions

First off, you have to dilute the Castile soap with water. This is great since now the bottle of Castile soap will last even longer.

We typically do 1 part liquid Castile soap to 4-5 parts water. This seems to work well for us but we have heard from others they use even more water.

Next, add in some essential oils of your choice. We settled for adding 15 drops lavender and 15 drops of tree tea oil to a 200mL bottle.

And that's it! That's the whole recipe. It really is that easy.

We love how versatile this "recipe" can be. Feel free to try new scents and see what ends up being your favorite. Try different Castile Soaps in addition to mixing up the essential oils.

We like the lavender Castile Soap and lavender essential oil.

For our eco-friendly lifestyle, this shampoo has been perfect. We typically use a bottle of Dr. Bronner's liquid Castile soap that we buy from Amazon.

Since we move around a lot buying online makes it easier to get no matter where we are. Plus we have more options for scents to choose from if we ever get tired of lavender.

The soap does come in a plastic bottle but a little goes a long way. We also try to get the jumbo size to decrease our plastic use.

Some stores sell Castile soap in bulk where you can bring your own glass container. This is an even better option for our zero-waste goals.

Side Note

At one point we decided to combine our bottle of tree tea oil and our bottle of Castile liquid soap. We just opened the Castile soap bottle and dumped in the entire essential oil bottle. This way we would have fewer items, be more minimalist, and it would save us time making the shampoo later.

DO NOT DO THIS!

About a month later when we needed to do some cleaning we saw to our horror that the bottle of what should be very liquidy Castile soap had gelled! We don’t know why this happened but it did and we only have the addition of tree tea oil to blame. To be on the safe side, do not combine the oil until you are making your shampoo.

How to Improve Your Final Look

We love our DIY shampoo. It does add some texture to our hair, which for people with very fine hair can be a big plus.

With this mixture, we will admit that at times your hair may still look a little stringy in places. Through trial and error, we have found easy ways to combat this.

Rinse with Vinegar

Most people suggest using apple cider vinegar, but we have also used white vinegar with good results. We just kept a small bottle with a small opening that seemed to work great because you don’t need a lot.

After rinsing out our DIY shampoo we gave a few shakes onto our head and then did one more good rinse. This worked like a charm but there was the downside of the vinegar smell.

Rinse Every Part of Your Scalp

This seems like silly (and obvious) advice but it worked. Phil has short hair so this is easy for him but Kelsey has very long hair.

She has to make sure that water hits the sides and under all of her hair as well. Best to just give yourself a little scalp massage during the rinsing process for a win-win.

Use Dry Shampoo

If you are worried about spots that may look too greasy, just sprinkle on baby powder and it looks good as new. This always helps your hairstyle last the whole day.

Give it Time

After about a month of using our DIY shampoo, it seemed our hair appeared less greasy and less stringy. It still has a little bit more texture to it but we liked this part.

Be Okay with a Little Grease

Sometimes a little grease looks more natural and healthy. So just let your hair look however you want it to.

This DIY shampoo with liquid Castile Soap works and seems to thicken your hair some. Unfortunately, at times, it makes some parts look greasy. There are ways to combat this or just rock your natural-looking hair.

We do still love this liquid shampoo recipe but because of our shift to a tiny trailer home a few years back and having to find showers elsewhere, we decided it may be easier to have a more solid option.

Therefore when we aren't using our DIY liquid version we opt for a shampoo bar. Lush was the first one we tried but now we buy Body & Earth Shampoo bar available at Amazon and Walmart.

If you guys have any other essential oil suggestions please let us know in the comments below!