If you’re looking for ways to save money, you should seriously consider making homemade self-care and home products. Not only will making homemade  products save you big bucks on the products that you use every day, however the benefits of making natural homemade products don’t end with finances.

In addition, you know exactly whats is in the products you’re putting on your body and using around your home. Forget those unpronounceable ingredients and foreign chemicals that may cause skin, hormonal or respiratory irritation. 

Lastly, if you're like Sarah and I, you might find making your own products fun. If you enjoy crafting and DIY projects, then you’ll enjoy making homemade products. We are all busy and so we keep our recipes super simply and quick! 

Here are three ways you can save you money with DIY natural products:

(1) Fewer Ingredients

Homemade products have far fewer ingredients than about 99% of the products you’ll find at the store. Fewer ingredients mean they’re cheaper to make.

For example, look at our collection of DIY self-care product recipes and DIY home cleaning product recipes, the most ingredients any of the recipes has is 6.

Flip over any self-care or home cleaning product at the store and you’ll see a long list of ingredients, some unpronounceable, in a font so small you can barely read them.

(2) Shared Ingredients

Many homemade beauty products share ingredients such as certain essential oils. This means you purchase fewer products and therefore keep your money where it belongs… in your wallet.

We use Castile Soap to make foaming and liquid hand and body washes, facial cleansers, all purpose cleaning sprays and more.

Coconut Oil is another versatile product. 24 of our DIY recipes include coconut oil. 

Bonus: Since homemade products tend to share ingredients, not only are you saving money, but you’re also not wasting other ingredients.

For our list of most used raw ingredients that you can find on the cheap at stored you might visit regularly such as Bunnings, Woolies and Coles, check out our cheat sheet.

(3) No “Side Effects”

Believe it or not, many of the store bought products that make claim to do weird and wonderful things, may actually cause problems. 

Our homemade beauty products are all natural and gentle. This means they are going to service you and your family well without any nasty side effects.

(4) Minimal Wastage

Wasting beauty products (or any product for that matter) is like throwing money in the garbage. So, why do we do it? Usually it is a sensory issue. For example, the texture or colour isn’t just right or the scent isn’t to our liking or you prefer no scent at all.

The other issue is the impulse buy. We see some new fan dangle product and think “Yes, that’ll take 10 years off” or “Wow! That colour is fun” then we buy it and 2 hours later find ourselves wondering “What was I thinking?”

Homemade products can fix this!

With homemade products you can easily experiment to get just the right colour, texture or scent.  If smell is an irritants, than products can be made free or any scent or can be easily adjusted to your liking and your needs using pure essential oils.

As for the impulse buy issue, if you have to actually exert more effort than merely handing over some cash or swiping a credit card, you might put a little more thought into your purchases. Homemade products are not hard to make, but for most of them, there is more effort required than just picking a product out and carrying it to the register.

So, in summary, homemade self-care and home cleaning products can save you money and allow you to get a fully customisable product to your liking.

Homemade products are quick and easy to make and just about any product you can buy at the store can be made at home. Try your hand at making one of our DIY self-care and home cleaning recipes and use these tips to save money.

It is estimated that in its full capacity, a single four-star hotel with 200 rooms can use around 300,000 pieces of single-use plastic in just a month. To understand the scale of the problem we only need to multiply this number by 700,000 - a recent estimate of how many hotels and resorts there are worldwide. Yikes!

Even with the world now at a tipping-point when it comes to plastic waste, hotels are still using single-use amenities and even though they are recyclable containers, we pose the question, how much is actually being successfully recycled?

Shockingly, 91% of plastic waste isn’t recycled and 73% of beach litter is plastic (according to National Geographic) and when it comes to single use hotel amenities we can think of a few obvious reasons why this would be:

• Product left in containers ( on average only 15% off product in a single-use amenity bottle is used)
  
  
• The smaller size of the bottle, can mean that during the sorting process, containers can slip through the sorting fingers and end up in land-fill
  
  
• Labels or printed bottles can be problematic and not always made of recyclable materials that can be melted at the same temperatures as PET 1 or 2

So really, recyclable single-use hotel amenities aren’t an eco-friendly solution in our eyes, it’s a half-assed attempt with up to 95% of the plastic used in your hotel room ending up in landfill where they sit for hundreds of years, adding to the 20 million tonnes of garbage added to landfill in Australia alone. 

At this point, we’d heard enough… how could we not create a range of refillable bottles, sustainable sourced, natural products, stylish and secure wall bracket systems and plastic free solid hair and body bars to support hotels that are serious about reducing their environmental impact and meet the demands of more environmentally conscious travellers? 

To learn more about our natural and sustainable products for hotels and airbnb accommodation, visit aromabotanics.com.au