The Freckled Farm Soap Company

Tag: shampoo

  • Best Soaps for Your Hair

    Yes, you can use our soap on your hair! I wrote a blog post about it earlier this year (Here). It takes your hair a little while to adjust to the change in regiment, but once it does you then have an all natural alternative to commercial shampoos! The following are the soaps that we like to use:

    Coffee Goat Milk Soap

    Our Coffee Goat Milk Soap has a PH that is great for hair. This is the bar I use! It is a great deodorizer and has helped control my wild and crazy waves.

    Find our Coffee Goat Milk Soap Here

    Canine Shampoo Goat Milk Soap

    That’s right! We are suggesting that you use our Canine Shampoo Goat Milk Soap on your hair. It has tea tree, lavender, and rosemary essential oils, all of which are great for your hair. This is the bar Kevin likes to use!

    Find our Canine Shampoo Goat Milk Soap Here

  • Using our Goat Milk Soap as Shampoo – Revisited

    Two years ago I wrote a blog post about my experience using our goat milk soap as shampoo (You can find it here). The post gets incredible traffic, last year pulling in thousands of views. After spending several years using the soap I felt it was time to revisit this post and share some tips that I have learned from years of continued use.

    Using Goat Milk Soap as Shampoo from The Freckled Farm Soap Company

    In 2014, I set out to eliminate all commercial body care products from our household in order to reduce the chemicals that my family was being exposed to. That year we started to make our own deodorant, and used our handmade goat milk soap for everything possible, including washing our hands and bodies (of course), shaving, and shampoo. If you read the post from two years ago you will learn that I was quite skeptical about changing out my shampoo, but knew it was something that I needed to at least try.

    In all of this the important thing to remember is, like with most natural alternatives, it’s not going to act like and give you the same result as their commercial counterparts. There are pros and cons on both sides.

    The commercial soaps are often chemical based. They include chemicals that are specially designed to give your hair specific qualities, and in many cases they do as they are designed to do (pro). While these chemicals may be able to make your hair do what you want it to do, they could also be harmful to your health and to the environment (big con). For me, commercial soaps made my hair frizzy and my scalp dry and itchy, no matter what brand or specially product I used (con).

    Natural soaps, like our goat milk soap, are made with natural materials making them better for you and the environment (big pro), however they are not specifically designed to be used on hair (con). Because the soap does not strip your hair nearly as bad as the commercial brands do (at least in my experience), it makes your hair feel heavier (con), but hair tends to be a lot less greasy between washings (pro). For me, our goat milk soap made my hair feel stronger and less frizzy (pro). My waves continue to be more uniformed and less wild (pro) but my hair does not feel the same as it did with the commercial shampoos (con).

    With both the commercial shampoos and our goat milk soap I have to strip my hair at least once a month. While the build up on my hair and scalp with our soaps has been far less than it was with the commercial shampoos I still need to strip my hair with this vinegar and water mixture about once a month.

    When I started my experiment I was using our Castile soap because it was our most moisturizing bar and I was dealing with a very dry scalp and frizzy hair. I later found that this soap was too heavy to be used as a shampoo. Some of our customers, who have serious scalp issues, still swear by it, but for me it weighed my hair down too much. I have since started using our coffee goat milk soap or canine shampoo. The coffee goat milk soap’s PH is perfect for hair and the canine shampoo contains tea tree which is great for for dealing with dry itchy scalp.

    All in all I have had a good experience using our goat milk soap as shampoo. After years of use my hair feels stronger and more healthy.

  • Using our Goat Milk Soap Canine Shampoo

    People are always asking us how our Canine Shampoo works. It’s in bar form, like all of our soaps, and most people are used to working with liquid dog shampoo. Does it lather well? How is it applied? Does it rinse clean? Does it work on long haired dogs? So I wanted to do this post to show it in action…

    Last week our two dogs, Frankie and Annabelle, got out and ran away. They were gone for two days and it was awful. When we finally got them home we noticed that they were completely covered in ticks. I spent time picking the ticks off, but when it came to Frankie getting the ticks out of his hair was nearly impossible. I removed any I could on his stomach, but we were going to have to find an alternative for the rest of his body… So we used our Goat Milk Soap Canine Shampoo on him. For the rest of the evening ticks were practically falling off of him…

    Our Canine Shampoo lathers great, as you can see in the pictures below, and it rinses very easily and clean. It’s applied by rubbing the bar directly on the dog. This avoids waste. With those liquid soaps, at least in our experience, you end up using half the bottle in one wash. You pour the soap on their back and have to pull it all over their bodies. You end up using a lot more than you need. With our soap we have only used one bar on our dogs since we debuted the soap last summer. That would make for four or so washes with two dogs and the bar is still not gone. It leaves Frankie’s hair, who has a long wire hair, soft and clean!

    Goat Milk Soap Canine Shampoo from The Freckled Farm Soap Company

  • Using our Goat Milk Soap as Shampoo

    I have now been using our Goat Milk Soap as shampoo for two and have since revisited this post. See the new post here!

    I want to start by saying that I was truly skeptical about this. We have used our soap as shampoo on our children since the beginning, because it was the healthiest, cheapest option, but neither of them have a lot of hair and I wasn’t concerned about their hair “behaving”. I had fleeting thoughts about using it myself, but I have thick wavy hair that rarely behaves even with professional products, so I didn’t want to make my hair issues anymore challenging by using a product that wasn’t designed specifically for hair or my hair type.

    A few months after we opened I started to hear about customers using our soaps as shampoo with good results. A little over a month ago Kevin took the plunge and ditched the store bought shampoo as well… of course he didn’t inform me of this until I bought him a new bottle of his shampoo. I guess it’s a good thing that I didn’t even notice he made the change. I finally decided that I needed to try it out myself. With my goal of getting rid of all my skin or hair care products that contain chemicals I would eventually need to figure out something else for my shampoo anyways. Why not start with something I already have?

    I waited until I had a week when I didn’t have a lot of meetings or work outside of the house to conduct my experiment. The first time I washed my hair right after I used the soap, while my hair was still wet, it had that stiff sticky feeling you get after swimming. It wasn’t the slick, smooth feeling I normally got with my old shampoo. When my hair dried it looked pretty normal… until I had reached the 24 hour mark from my last wash. It was greasy and I’m not used to my hair getting greasy so quickly. Normally, I only wash my hair every other day or every two days because anymore than that and my hair would get super dried out and frizzy (Don’t worry. I shower everyday. I just don’t always wash my hair). All of my friends with a similar hair type have the same issues, so I just thought it was normal. Needless to say I was concerned with how greasy my hair was in such a short period of time, I didn’t have time to double my hair routine, but I decided to keep working with it. I did a little research and found what was causing my issue. Normal shampoos strip your hair of it’s natural oils. Much like normal store bought “soaps” strip the natural oils of your skin. So how our soaps balance the PH and oils of your skin it is doing the same for your hair. I often tell our customers that if they plan to use our soaps on their face then they needed to allow for about a week to a week and a half for their skin to adjust (skin elsewhere does not seem to need this adjustment time). I needed to allow my hair to adjust. So I washed my hair everyday, and as the days passed it took longer and longer to get greasy. After about 4 or 5 days I was able to go back to my every other day hair washing regiment.

    Normally, my hair is out of control. It waves in every direction and I am in a constant fight against the frizz (one of the reasons I have always avoided washing it everyday). I don’t do much to my hair. I wash it, let it air dry, then straighten it to avoid the hair sticking out in every direction. I don’t use product. I really don’t have time for all of that. I figured I should maybe buy a hairdryer since I was going to have to wash it more often, yes I had committed to using the soap at that point, even if that meant I had to wash my hair more often (it takes my hair hours to dry), and no I did not own a hairdryer, so I ordered one on Amazon. After about 4 or 5 days of using the soap I noticed a nice change though. My hair maintained it’s body, but the frizz was non-exsistant. My waves waved in (mostly) the same direction. I haven’t straightened my hair since I started using our soap as shampoo. At first because I didn’t have the time to wash my hair everyday, let it dry for 3 hours, then spend the 30 or so minutes straightening it, but now it’s because I don’t need to! Before I wouldn’t dream of going out without my hair either up or straightened. I’m quite pleased with how it looks naturally now.

    One more good side effect. I have been battling a dry scalp for months. It’s been driving me crazy. I have never had this problem in the past. Our soaps are great for healing dry and damaged skin…I guess the same goes for the skin on your scalp. It’s a much better option than medicated shampoos.

    Here we are, two weeks later, and I don’t plan to ever go back to regular shampoo. I would call that a successful experiment! Now what do I do with the barely used bottles of shampoo and conditioner that we have?

    I used our Castile Goat Milk Soap for this experiment

    *** This is was a personal experiment and there is no guarantee that you will have the same results. Our soaps are designed to be used on the skin and we cannot claim that it will work on hair, but I do suggest you try yourself! ****