Coconut free and petroluem free shampoo?

[sparkchaser]

My wife has some very interesting allergies, including coconut, petroleum, and sodium laurel sulfate. She has been struggling for years to find a shampoo that won't make her scalp break out. Right now she is using with some success powdered yucca root but even then she still has to use something else every few days.

Can anyone recommend a shampoo that we can try?

 

[adamant]

Could always try not using shampoo, or using only a couple of times a week. Your scalp doesn't make as much oil if you don't keep washing it off.

I know Tom's of Maine sells SLS free toothpaste, maybe some of their shampoo would qualify as well? On checking their website, they don't sell any shampoo. Maybe a bar of soap, Tom's clear body bar doesn't appear to have coconut, unlike much of their stuff.

 

[sparkchaser]

No go on the Tom's soap. They use Sodium cocoate.

 

[adamant]

Ah, my bad, I just saw that it didn't have coconut oil.

 

[sparkchaser]

No worries. I am hoping that someone here is going to know about some esoteric mom & pop soap maker that only uses olive oil or something. For some reason, all of the French milled olive oil soaps she has tried have given her reactions.

 

[adamant]

No impact man uses baking soda and water. It "doesn't suds, but cleans very well", so says he. He also tried Castile soap

Maybe you could make the bar shampoo with palm oil instead of coconut?

 

[sparkchaser]

Castile has been an issue too, believe it or not.

I wish I had the know-how to make a shampoo bar from palm oil. Or even yucca root.

 

[adamant]

There is a recipe on that site, but calls for coconut, maybe you could substitute palm?

 

[sparkchaser]

That's a possibility. Let me run it by her and see what she thinks.

 

[mikegeorge]

Have a look at Morrocco Method.http://www.morroccomethod.com/shampoo.shtml
It might be just what you are looking for.

 

[Mr-Scruffy]

Burts Bees has some shampoo and shampoo bars which may work.

 

[krissy]

My wife has some very interesting allergies, including coconut, petroleum, and sodium laurel sulfate.

Is your wife allergic to just products made with coconut oil? I ask this because that is one of the reasons I now make a shampoo that is SLS free (does not contain any petroleum products) and is wonderful on the hair. But the surfactant that I am currently using is a product that is based on purified fatty acids derived from Natural Coconut Oil. (the manufacturing process produces no hazardous or environmental threatening by-products and is completely biodegradable. It is a higher end shampoo that contains your silks, and wheat protein as well as the added panthenol B5 to make it very luxurious. This shampoo gives awesome lather and rinses very clean and only a small amount is needed.

The ingredients do cost a little bit but I'm using a variation of a recipe that is posted on a page of a well known supplier to those that make soap and other bath and body products. If this is something that worked for your wife it might be more cost effective to learn to make it yourself. All you need to do is measure out the ingredients by weight and mix them together in a specific order. Super Simple.

There are so many people who have allergies to the SLS and are having a hard time finding products they can use. But many of the good surfactants are derived from coconut oil, but they are not actually coconut oil.



Coconut oil and Palm oil can not be interchanged because they have two totally different functions in soap.

Coconut Oil is used in soap and it actually multi-tasks in a bar soap recipe. It's used for three basic properties. It provides cleansing properties but if you use too much it can over strip the skin of it's natural oils. It's used to help give your bar of soap hardness. But it's also used to help give those great big bubbles that you like to see when you lather a bar of soap.

While Palm oil has one major function and that is to help make a hard bar of soap and needs to be used in conjunction with other oils. Although it does give a few benefits to the moisturizing effects that are left behind after you wash as well as a little bit to the creamy lather, which is different than the bubbly lather.


I saw this post and thought I would respond, so enough lurking I guess I had better go make an intro post.

 

[cymric]

My wife has some very interesting allergies, including coconut, petroleum, and sodium laurel sulfate.

Well, that makes it impossible to use any soap whatsoever, and renders most of the other readily available detergents unusable. Soap is made up of long hydrocarbon molecules, some short, and some long. If your wife's skin cannot handle these molecules, then she needs a detergent which is not based on them. And those are hard to come by, especially in regular skin care products. In theory, silicone-based surfactants might be the answer, but to my knowledge they have never been used with human skin cleaning in mind, only as emollients.

There are few things about your story which puzzle me, though. I was always under the impression that a coconut allergy is caused by coconut protein, which is not present at all in any coconut oil-based soap or shampoo---it's been weeded out by the soap-making process. So the coconut allergy shouldn't trigger a response from your spouse. Second, yucca root is rather like a potato, containing lots of starch, and very little else. Washing your hair with dried root to me sounds not particularly appealing: I'd expect my hair to become a sticky mess rather than squeaky clean. There must be more to that product than just the root. Do you have an ingredient list? Finally---and forgive me if I'm kicking in an open door here---not being able to use any kind of soap to me sounds like a job for a dermatologist. Does your wife see one, and if so, with what result?

 

[cymric]

Have a look at Morrocco Method.http://www.morroccomethod.com/shampoo.shtml
It might be just what you are looking for.

Ehm, no. It contains 'rich, pale sulfonated shale oil (not a tar): rejuvenates and restores' which is another way of saying 'saponified Arabian crude oil' and then coax twice or thrice the amount of money out of your pocket. I do not make any statement as to the holistical differences between shale and tar and petroleum---I can't, as an exceedingly skeptical chemical engineer---but I am making one about the product's chemical makeup.

To the OP: if your wife has problems with sodium laureth sulphate, she'll have problems with this too. Perhaps more, perhaps less, but problems there will be.

 

[gollum83]

Ehm, no. It contains 'rich, pale sulfonated shale oil (not a tar): rejuvenates and restores' which is another way of saying 'saponified Arabian crude oil' and then coax twice or thrice the amount of money out of your pocket. I do not make any statement as to the holistical differences between shale and tar and petroleum---I can't, as an exceedingly skeptical chemical engineer---but I am making one about the product's chemical makeup.

To the OP: if your wife has problems with sodium laureth sulphate, she'll have problems with this too. Perhaps more, perhaps less, but problems there will be.

Agreed, this isn't going to help in the least. Besides I'm skeptical of anything that relies on the "13-moon lunar cycle to energize the products and increase their potency."