Someone once asked Edison, a good way into his light bulb experiments, about all of his “failures” at inventing the light bulb. He answered that he had simply found that many (I think it was 100) ways not to make a light bulb.
I think I’ve come up with a couple dozen ways not to “go green” with cleaning and personal care. All those natural deodorants out there? They don’t work. The crystal? Doesn’t work. Deodorant with cotton? Doesn’t work. The half-dozen “health food store brands” of deodorant? Don’t work. Coconut oil-and-baking-soda-based deodorant? Doesn’t work. [UPDATE: This works.]
Organic shampoos without chemical surfactants? Most of them don’t suds, so it’s impossible to work them all the way through the hour without using about a 1/4 cup of the stuff. (And they cost about eight times as much as conventional shampoo.) “Green” bathroom cleaners? Not worth the time.
I have found a couple things that work well. Trader Joe’s has a paraben-free shaving cream
LOL, I was just giving the Edison speech to a friend last night!
Anyhow, I’ve been using “Lafe’s Natural Crystal” deodorant and I’ve been super impressed by it — more impressed than regular brand-name deodorants. But, I guess everyone’s different and it may not work for everyone.
As far as green cleaners go, my experience has been that just using plain baking soda or plain vinegar (depending on what you’re cleaning) usually works better than the brand-name cleaners. Seriously, I tried all sorts of oven cleaner on a stain and it didn’t budge until I used some baking soda. It also works great in the bathroom on all sorts of surfaces. And I went through all sorts of window cleaner before trying white vinegar and I’ll never go back. I’m not sure I know what the time issue is with them since I find that I save time with simple solutions like that, but if you’re mixing together some of those “make your own cleaner” recipes then you may be doing things the hard way. From what I can tell, many of the recipes don’t clean much (if any) better, they just add in things to make it seem more like commercial cleaner. I read one that said to add blue food coloring to vinegar to make eco-friendly glass cleaner — seriously! Trust me, it works just fine without wasting food coloring or messing up vinegar that could still be used for other things.
Shampoo bars are a bit inconvenient. It might help to pre-liquify a bit. I hear that some are very fragrancy, too. I’m still using up my regular shampoo, but I’ve experimented with a bar of pure, unscented castille soap and the results were decent enough. I do like rinse my hair with vinegar occasionally (makes it shiny and bouncy like nothing else) and baking soda is also great to remove buildup on your hair.
I’ve heard good things about coconut oil, but I haven’t tried it yet. I don’t use a lot of conditioning stuff on my hair since I have an oily scalp, but I do plan to use some at some point to help my drier ends.
Oh, and for shaving cream, you might consider just putting soap in a mug and using a shaving brush to create a good lather.