Our Tallow Soap, Beeswax Lip Balm, Natural Tooth Powder, and Ginger Honey are described below. All of them are 100% fragrance free and natural with a bare minimum of ingredients, hand made /assembled at home.
Tallow Soap
Ingredients: 100% hand rendered tallow, lye (read all the details about our ingredients here). Nothing else. FRAGRANCE FREE.
If you're local to the Atherton Tablelands, you can also buy our soap at Atherton Health Foods, at the Atherton Food Coop and at Sprout to Life in Malanda.
Keep scrolling for more info and user's comments 🙂
Read about our ingredients, soap-making process, and ethics
- "So nice to find an economical, simple, fragrance-free soap that is locally and ethically made and that I know is good for my family's skin"
- “Best shaving soap ever”
- “Solved a problem I had with stinging, itchy skin after showering”
- “Fixed a rash on my hands, which comes back whenever I stop using this soap”
- "I use it all over, including washing my hair"
- "We all use it; it even works great for our dog and I feel good about not using nasty ingredients on her"
- "Longest lasting soap I ever had"
Why we don't use essential oils in our Soap
Essential oils can both heal and harm. They're harvested and processed on an industrial scale with big impacts on plants and aquatic environments. They're also highly concentrated and extremely powerful, with the potential to dull our senses, to kill normal as well as abnormal cells, and to contribute to antibiotic resistance. I support the careful use of essential oils by qualified healers; I avoid them in other settings.
Where to purchase
If you're local to the Atherton Tablelands, you can also buy our soap at Atherton Health Foods, at the Atherton Food Coop and at Sprout to Life in Malanda.
Beeswax Lip Balm
Ingredients: local bees wax + olive oil. FRAGRANCE FREE.
Olive oil and beeswax are skin-friendly ingredients that our bodies understand and agree with. Beeswax comes from bee keepers who need our support to maintain honey bee populations.
Where to purchase
If you're local to the Atherton Tablelands, you can buy our lip balm at the Atherton Food Coop and at Sprout to Life in Malanda.
CONTACT ME to order directly from us. (Online shop coming soon.)
Tooth Powder
Ingredients: bentonite clay, baking soda, salt, peppermint leaf powder, stevia leaf powder.
Read on to find out:
- why this instead of toothpaste from tubes?
- about using and storing this tooth powder
- why we don't use essential oils in our tooth powder
Where to purchase
If you're local to the Atherton Tablelands, you can buy our tooth powder at the Atherton Food Coop and at Sprout to Life in Malanda.
CONTACT ME to order directly from us. (Online shop coming soon.)
Why use this instead of toothpaste in tubes?
The sweet, foamy stuff in the tubes in the supermarket is packed with ingredients that can damage our oral health. They have nothing to do with cleaning our teeth -- they're purely to make the toothpaste appeal to modern consumer taste.
Even most toothpastes labelled "natural" contain ingredients that are unfriendly to our oral micro-biome. And almost all of them are wastefully packaged.
Above: our tooth powder ingredients - bentonite clay, peppermint leaf powder, salt, baking soda, stevia leaf powder (see below for why the coconut oil is in the picture.)
Here are some of the reasons we've used these ingredients:
- The salt and bicarb soda discourage unfriendly bacteria and support a healthy oral micro-biome, stimulate blood circulation in your gums, and encourage salivation while reducing acidity - which supports the remineralization process of healthy tooth enamel
- The bentonite clay may bind with toxins to remove them, and it also reduces the salty taste
- The peppermint leaf has health-supporting properties and provides flavor and aroma (without the potentially toxic effects of essential oils)
- The stevia leaf powder acts as a sweetener (it's important to use actual powdered leaves, not isolated stevia compounds)
Your toddler could eat this without harm. And we use washable, re-fillable containers that you can return rather than tossing in the rubbish.
Notes about using and storing this tooth powder
If you've been used to using toothpaste in tubes, these tips will help you make the switch to natural tooth powder successfully.
The peppermint and stevia leaf powders in this mixture lose their aroma and flavor quickly when wet, and the salt attracts moisture. So it's a good idea to:
- put it in the fridge or in air conditioning if you're keeping it any length of time. When it's in use you can keep it in the bathroom but if you're storing it, put it somewhere with low humidity.
- train your family not to dip dripping toothbrushes in it and to screw the lid back on after use to keep moisture out as much as possible.
If you prefer a paste, it's easy to add water or coconut oil to this tooth powder to form a paste. Do this in small quantities and don't try to store the paste for long. (Coconut oil is also super healthy for your teeth, but it will gunk up your tooth brushes over time; they'll need a hot soap wash every now and then.)
Why we don't use essential oils in our Tooth Powder
Essential oils can both heal and harm. They're harvested and processed on an industrial scale with big impacts on plants, aquatic environments, and people, and may contribute to antibiotic resistance. I support the careful use of essential oils by qualified healers; otherwise I avoid them.
Where to purchase
If you're local to the Atherton Tablelands, you can buy our tooth powder at the Atherton Food Coop and at Sprout to Life in Malanda.
CONTACT ME to order directly from us. (Online shop coming soon.)
Ginger Honey
Ingredients: organically grown ginger from our own garden + raw unfiltered local honey.
Ginger has an amazing array of medicinal benefits, and preserving it in honey is a great way to make them readily available.
- Use liberally for coughs, colds, sore throats, cold or flu-related earaches, and sinus congestion. Tuck into it as soon as you feel a cold or flu coming on.
- Strain out the lumps and use as cough medicine (not for children under 1 year).
- Pour boiling water over a teaspoonful (lumps and all) in a cup to make soothing ginger tea.
- Put it (with or without the lumps) on your toast, drizzle it into your yogurt, muesli, or porridge, add into stir fries.
This is a live, probiotic food, so please refrigerate if it's going to be more than a few days before you use it all up.
Available locally at the Atherton Food Coop. Or better yet, make your own - I wrote about making ginger honey here, and about growing ginger here.
Where to purchase
Currently we are selling our ginger honey locally only (Atherton Tablelands). You can buy our ginger honey at the Atherton Food Coop, or CONTACT ME to order directly from us.
About us
Image coming soon
We're a family of 4 with a small farm near Millaa Millaa. For 16 years we've been practicing healthier choices in what we eat, wash with, and put on our skin. Recently we've begun to offer for sale some of the products we make for ourselves.
It's all hand made in small batches at our kitchen table with the simplest and most local ingredients possible. Our goal is to source our ingredients first from our own garden and farm, secondly from local small businesses, and thirdly from ethical sellers who care about their impact.
We believe it's up to all of us, in our own kitchens, gardens, and communities, to get on with taking better care of ourselves and our families in ways that also take care of the world around us.
