It typically costs at least double for the all natural products.  Anyone know why that is?  Depending on where you live the prices may be higher or lower, but where we live a bottle of the cheapest window cleaner at the big stores costs about $1.00 but the organic cleaners cost around $5.00.  A 64 oz bottle of liquid hand soap costs around $5.00 but a 12 oz bottle of castile soap costs about $10.  Why such a huge jump?

Take this as an example: Castile soap is the most basic soap there is with a total ingredient list of only olive oil, water, and lye (some artisans add essential oils and other fats/oils, but the simplest version is just three ingredients).  With even the smallest ingredients list, it still costs me about $4.50/bar just to make it (not including the cost of curing it, labeling it, storing it, packaging it, plus shipping it out.) Pretty high right?  You may think that the artisans selling soap for $8-12 / bar are price hiking because its "natural" and that is what is "in" right now.  Well friends, that is typically not the case.  It is because it costs way more to make a pure product than a partial product loaded with chemicals to make it appear as though it works as a pure product.

Have you ever heard of sodium laurel sulfate?  Check every single product in your house that bubbles- soap, shampoo, laundry detergent, stain removers, dish soap, car cleaners, flea shampoo, baby shampoo, etc. Chances are you will find Sodium laurel sulfate in the ingredients list.  It is a really cheap chemical additive that causes bubbling.  Why would you need to add in a chemical additive to make soap bubble you ask? Shouldn't soap bubble just fine on it's own without chemical aid?  Well, it is because you are not using real soap.  You are using a chemical concoction made to mimic soap.  Most of the products really wouldn't bubble without the additive because it was too costly for the large companies to produce batches by the thousands of pure product, so they found a cheaper chemical alternative.  The cheaper costs for your soap products are great for them and great for you right?  They are pretty affordable, but now studies are finding the long term side effects of the over exposure of sodium laurel sulfate are devastating families all over the world.

Now that we know why it costs so much more to purchase the "green" products, we are now going to learn about how the huge companies trick you daily and how to get around it.  Oh yes, you are being tricked every single day.  TV commercials and the big stores have pounded into our heads that you need twenty different cleaners to get the job done.  We have been fooled into thinking you can only use window cleaner for windows, tile cleaner for tile, hardwood floor cleaner for wood, dish soap for dishes, laundry detergent for clothes, furniture polish for furniture, tub cleaner for tube, and so on so forth.  WRONG.  During my personal switch to all-natural when our twins were born six weeks premature I discovered the world we live in is a huge illusion brought on by marketing strategies to make the larger companies more money.  Castile soap for example, can be used for everything that bubbles- soap, shampoo, face wash, baby shampoo, pet shampoo, and dish soap.  We even grate the bars and mix it with borax (a natural product mined from the earth and once carried out by mules in Death Valley in the 1880s- search 20 mule team borax on the internet, its a really neat story) to make laundry detergent.  So one natural product literally just cut out the need for six store bought chemical filled products.  One "real" soap just knocked the socks off of all those store bought cleaners AND it's contents aren't slowly building up in your family's bodies.