If you follow natural hair YouTuber Naptural85 (Whitney), you might remember her DIY Homemade Natural Shampoo With African Black Soap recipe video from a few years ago. In it, she combines African black soap with vegetable glycerin and essential oils to create a super cleansing and nourishing shampoo treatment. I’ve wanted to try it out for a looong time. Honestly, I probably should’ve done my homework a little better before testing this out because the ingredients in this are not the best for the environment.
In this recipe, essential oils are used for scalp cell regeneration, antioxidants to protect the hair from free radicals, antifungal/antiseptic properties, and hair strengthening. We definitely need to address the detrimental environmental impacts of essential oils when we consider this recipe. Since essential oils are so highly concentrated, it takes a lot of plants/leaves/fruit in order to create even a small bottle of oil. This means that often large monocultures run by huge corporations are degrading the land in order to create essential oils. According to this Earth Island Journal article, good things to look for if you are shopping for essential oils are organic certifications and if the plant was grown in its native habitat, both of which often mean that fewer inputs like pesticides and fertilizers are used.