How to make your own shampoo

Photo Credit: Svetlana Larina

By Susan Pitman

Although commercial shampoo is readily available in many different varieties, it can be fun and satisfying to make your own. Perhaps you have hair that does not respond well to any of the shampoos you have found. Or perhaps you wish to make sure of the purity of the ingredients in your shampoo. Whatever your reason, here are some simple recipes for making your own shampoo.

Before you start, there are a few things to know about homemade shampoos. Since you will not be adding any sudsing agents, they will not lather up as much as a commercial shampoo. Commercial shampoos contain both sudsing agents and substances to break down the suds. Your homemade shampoo may not be as thick as a commercial shampoo. However, it will clean just as well and very likely be much less expensive.

A simple castile shampoo is made with 4 ounces castile soap flakes and one quart water. Bring the water to a boil. Turn off the heat and pour water over the soap flakes. Stir until the soap flakes dissolve. Once the mixture has cooled, store it in a plastic bottle.

You may vary this recipe by adding essential oils to the shampoo. Lavender is very calming and makes a good addition to the shampoo. Peppermint and citrus are invigorating. Experiment with different oils to find the ones you like best. If you wish to add essential oils to your shampoo, mix 4 to 8 drops of the oil in a teaspoon of rubbing alcohol. Stir it into the soap mixture just after all the soap has dissolved.

You may also use this recipe to make an herbal shampoo. Instead of plain water, make an herbal infusion. Use one-half ounce of dried herbs for each quart of hot water. Let the herbs steep for at least 20 minutes. Reheat the infusion if necessary, pour the hot infusion over the soap flakes, and stir well. Rosemary is good for dark hair, while chamomile is a good herb to use for light hair. If you have hair that is too oily or too dry, make an infusion of burdock root, comfrey leaves, nettles, and rosemary leaves. This will help restore the natural balance of the hair.

A good shampoo to use for very dry hair is made of 1 cup of the basic shampoo recipe mixed with one-quarter cup olive, avocado, or almond oil. This helps eliminate the extra dryness caused by the chlorine from a pool or from exposing your hair to too much sun.

In Africa, a step backward on human rights

Washington Post
By Desmond Tutu
Friday, March 12, 2010; A19

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/11/AR2010031103341.html?wpisrc=nl_opinions

Hate has no place in the house of God. No one should be excluded from our love, our compassion or our concern because of race or gender, faith or ethnicity -- or because of their sexual orientation. Nor should anyone be excluded from health care on any of these grounds. In my country of South Africa, we struggled for years against the evil system of apartheid that divided human beings, children of the same God, by racial classification and then denied many of them fundamental human rights. We knew this was wrong. Thankfully, the world supported us in our struggle for freedom and dignity.
It is time to stand up against another wrong.

Gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people are part of so many families. They are part of the human family. They are part of God's family. And of course they are part of the African family. But a wave of hate is spreading across my beloved continent. People are again being denied their fundamental rights and freedoms. Men have been falsely charged and imprisoned in Senegal, and health services for these men and their community have suffered. In Malawi, men have been jailed and humiliated for expressing their partnerships with other men. Just this month, mobs in Mtwapa Township, Kenya, attacked men they suspected of being gay. Kenyan religious leaders, I am ashamed to say, threatened an HIV clinic there for providing counseling services to all members of that community, because the clerics wanted gay men excluded.

Uganda's parliament is debating legislation that would make homosexuality punishable by life imprisonment, and more discriminatory legislation has been debated in Rwanda and Burundi.

These are terrible backward steps for human rights in Africa.

Our lesbian and gay brothers and sisters across Africa are living in fear.

And they are living in hiding -- away from care, away from the protection the state should offer to every citizen and away from health care in the AIDS era, when all of us, especially Africans, need access to essential HIV services. That this pandering to intolerance is being done by politicians looking for scapegoats for their failures is not surprising. But it is a great wrong. An even larger offense is that it is being done in the name of God. Show me where Christ said "Love thy fellow man, except for the gay ones." Gay people, too, are made in my God's image. I would never worship a homophobic God.

"But they are sinners," I can hear the preachers and politicians say. "They are choosing a life of sin for which they must be punished." My scientist and medical friends have shared with me a reality that so many gay people have confirmed, I now know it in my heart to be true. No one chooses to be gay. Sexual orientation, like skin color, is another feature of our diversity as a human family. Isn't it amazing that we are all made in God's image, and yet there is so much diversity among his people? Does God love his dark- or his light-skinned children less? The brave more than the timid? And does any of us know the mind of God so well that we can decide for him who is included, and who is excluded, from the circle of his love?

The wave of hate must stop. Politicians who profit from exploiting this hate, from fanning it, must not be tempted by this easy way to profit from fear and misunderstanding. And my fellow clerics, of all faiths, must stand up for the principles of universal dignity and fellowship. Exclusion is never the way forward on our shared paths to freedom and justice.

The writer is archbishop emeritus of Cape Town, South Africa. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984.

From a ZNet commentary by Bill Blum:

About half the states in the US require that a woman seeking an abortion be told certain things before she can obtain the medical procedure. In South Dakota, for example, until a few months ago, staff was required to tell women: "The abortion will terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being"; the pregnant woman has "an existing relationship with that unborn human being," a relationship protected by the U.S. Constitution and the laws of South Dakota; and a "known medical risk" of abortion is an "increased risk of suicide ideation and suicide." A federal judge has now eliminated the second and third required assertions, calling them "untruthful and misleading." 1


I personally would question even the first assertion about a fetus or an embryo being a human being, but that's not the point I wish to make here. I'd like to suggest that before a young American man or woman can enlist in the armed forces s/he must be told the following by the staff of the military recruitment office:


"The United States is at war [this statement is always factually correct]. You will likely be sent to a battlefield where you will be expected to do your best to terminate the lives of whole, separate, unique, living human beings you know nothing about and who have never done you or your country any harm. You may in the process lose an arm or a leg. Or your life. If you come home alive and with all your body parts intact there's a good chance you will be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Do not expect the government to provide you particularly good care for that, or any care at all. In any case, you may wind up physically abusing your spouse and children and/or others, killing various individuals, abusing drugs and/or alcohol, and having an increased risk of suicide ideation and suicide. No matter how bad a condition you may be in, the Pentagon may send you back to the battlefield for another tour of duty. They call this 'stop-loss'. Your
only alternative may be to go AWOL. Do you have any friends in Canada? And don't ever ask any of your officers what we're fighting for. Even the generals don't know. In fact, the generals especially don't know. They would never have reached their high position if they had been able to go beyond the propaganda we're all fed, the same propaganda that has influenced you to come to this office."


Since for so many young people in recent years one of the determining factors in their enlistment has been the economy, this additional thought should be pointed out to them - "You are enlisting to fight, and perhaps die, for a country that can't even provide you with a decent job, or any job at all."

When Are WE Going to Get Over It?

This is a MUST read which resonates with at least 90% of the world. Please, please pass this one on, even if you have to print it and mail it to your "computer challenged" friends and relatives.

Read what a White Reporter wrote in a Georgia Newspaper (YESS)

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Andrew M. Manis is associate professor of history at Macon State College in Georgia and wrote this for an editorial in the Macon Telegraph.

For much of the last forty years, ever since America "fixed" its race problem in the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, we white people have been impatient with African Americans who continued to blame race for their difficulties. Often we have heard whites ask, "When are African Americans finally going to get over it?

Now I want to ask:

"When are we White Americans going to get over our ridiculous obsession with skin color?

Recent reports that "Election Spurs Hundreds' of Race Threats, Crimes" should frighten and infuriate every one of us. Having grown up in "Bombingham," Alabama in the 1960s, I remember overhearing an avalanche of comments about what many white classmates and their parents wanted to do to John and Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King.

Eventually, as you may recall, in all three cases, someone decided to do more than "talk the talk."

Since our recent presidential election, to our eternal shame we are once again hearing the same reprehensible talk I remember from my boyhood.

We white people have controlled political life in the disunited colonies and United States for some 400 years on this continent.

Conservative whites have been in power 28 of the last 40 years. Even during the eight Clinton years, conservatives in Congress blocked most of his agenda and pulled him to the right. Yet never in that period did I read any headlines suggesting that anyone was calling for the assassinations of presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan, or either of the Bushes. Criticize them, yes.

Call for their impeachment, perhaps. But there were no bounties on their heads. And even when someone did try to kill Ronald Reagan, the perpetrator was non-political mental case who wanted merely to impress Jody Foster.

But elect a liberal who happens to be Black and we're back in the sixties again. At this point in our history, we should be proud that we've proven what conservatives are always saying -- that in America anything is possible, EVEN electing a black man as president.

But instead we now hear that school children from Maine to California are talking about wanting to "assassinate Obama."

Fighting the urge to throw up, I can only ask, "How long?"

• How long before we white people realize we can't make our nation, much less the whole world, look like us?
• How long until we white people can - once and for all - get over this hell-conceived preoccupation with skin color?
• How long until we white people get over the demonic conviction that white skin makes us superior?
• How long before we white people get over our bitter resentments about being demoted to the status of equality with non-whites?
• How long before we get over our expectations that we should be at the head of the line merely because of our white skin?
• How long until we white people end our silence and call out our peers when they share the latest racist jokes in the privacy of our white-only conversations?
• I believe in free speech, but how long until we white people start making racist loudmouths as socially uncomfortable as we do flag burners?
• How long until we white people will stop insisting that blacks exercise personal responsibility, build strong families, educate themselves enough to edit the Harvard Law Review, and work hard enough to become President of the United States, only to threaten to assassinate them when they do?
• How long before we start "living out the true meaning" of our creeds, both civil and religious, that all men and women are created equal and that "red and yellow, black and white" all are precious in God's sight?
  

Until this past November 4, I didn't believe this country would ever elect an African American to the presidency. I still don't believe I'll live long enough to see us white people get over our racism problem.

But here's my three-point plan:

First, everyday that Barack Obama lives in the White House that Black Slaves Built, I'm going to pray that God (and the Secret Service) will protect him and his family from us white people.

Second, I'm going to report to the FBI any white person I overhear saying, in seriousness or in jest, anything of a threatening nature about President Obama.

Third, I'm going to pray to live long enough to see America surprise the world once again, when white people can "in spirit and in truth" sing of our damnable color prejudice,

"We HAVE overcome."

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It takes a Village to protect our President!!!