I wish my life could be as simple as that of “normal” people, like my ex.

My ex doesn’t use anything natural or ecological. He just goes to the supermarket and buys what everyone else buys.

He washes his laundry with any generic brand (supermarket brand) of detergent, whichever brand is cheapest, and uses generic brand fabric softener which in addition smells good. He doesn’t complicate his life.

He showers with regular shower gel and washes his hair (what little he has left) with regular sulphate shampoos. He doesn’t use conditioner, but then again he doesn’t have much hair to condition. (Har har I’m so mean aren’t I hehe?) He doesn’t use henna or colour his hair and it’s peppery hair.

But then again as they say I guess once you wake up (become aware) you can never UN-awaken again or become unaware again.

Unaware of all the harmful synthetic chemicals that they put in all the products that we use like in laundry detergent, fabric softener or shampoos.

Unaware of how harmful these synthetic chemicals are both for your health as well as for the environment. Unaware that going as natural as possible is the best thing you can do both for your health as well as for the world.

And you can see the results in the health of both my ex as well as his father. Ex has hardly any hair left. Of course I realize that is hereditary.

But maybe a healthier diet, lifestyle and healthier hair care might have made him go bald more slowly or even stopped him from going bald. I certainly know I DEFO have more hair and thicker hair since I started doing things to take care of it.

My hair has certainly come a long way since it was strawlike and fried years ago from monthly hair dyes dyeing it red. Before I discovered henna, I used to use a home hair dyeing kit in a box that was supposed to be more “natural” since it was supposed to be herbal. Well there was nothing herbal about it it was full of harmful chemicals. Maybe it had like a drop of herbs in it haha.

It just seems to me that my life is so much more complicated than my ex’s. He doesn’t wash his clothes with soap nuts, nor put baking soda, washing soda, ammonia and soap flakes into his laundry. He doesn’t wash his hair with solid shampoo, spend hours oiling it and whole days hennaing it.

I’d like to be able to live like him. I’d like to just throw the clothes into the washing machine, dump in some detergent pods and pour a bit of fabric softener into the fabric softener compartment and then just forget about it.

But I can’t do that anymore. Now I know all the junk that’s in laundry detergent, and that’s getting on your skin every time you put on your clothes washed in laundry detergent, and now that I know how bad laundry detergent is for the environment and how it’s killing fish and birds, I just can’t do that anymore.

I wish I could. It would make life so much easier, but I can’t. I wish I could continue to live in blissful ignorance.

But once you become aware you just can’t become UN-aware anymore.

Of course you could also not care. Ex probably sometimes hears about how laundry detergent is bad for lakes and fish and stuff, but he probably just doesn’t care.

I’ve been using soap nuts now I think for about 6 months. And it’s not as simple as using laundry detergent. I have to put the soap nuts in a jar of very hot water for about half an hour in order to activate them before doing the laundry. You can see already it’s more complicated using soap nuts than laundry detergent.

Then after half an hour, when the soap nuts have been activated and have started releasing soap, I throw the sack of soap nuts into the washing machine and also pour in the hot water that was in the jar with the soap nuts. Then I pour in a ton of water into the washing machine because I have a high efficiency front loader — the most popular type here in Europe I guess — and the reason it’s high efficiency is it hardly uses any water. But soap nuts need water to activate. So I have to manually pour in lots of water.

After that I just let wash as normal. But if the load is quite dirty and greasy then I do another cycle with ammonia before the soap nuts. Because soap nuts don’t work well with very greasy clothes. So you can see already that it’s more complicated than using laundry detergent.

But I think the results are worth it. Because then after that I know we are wearing clothes that have no harmful chemicals in them that can get into your skin. We didn’t throw anything down the drain that will later kill fish and birds. And it’s very cheap to boot.

And nothing feels like clothes that have been washed with only soap nuts. Clothes have a softness, mmmmmmmmmmmhhhhhhh, like you’ve never felt before not even with fabric softener. They feel like LIQUID CLOTHES that is how SOFT they feel.

But once again if you are a normal person you probably don’t care if your clothes are soft or not. And you’re probably not thinking too much about wildlife and all these strange and unknown plants and flowers out there. After all, animals and plants you never see have nothing to do with you anyway, right?

I read somewhere that if animals died, humans would die too. Because we depend on them in order to stay alive.

And I’m not just talking about how some people can’t live without steak or lamb chops either haha. But I’ll get off the soap box now. I’m sure everyone already knows all about this stuff.

Moving on to the category of hair care. My ex has hardly any hair left, but you really can’t tell how much of it is due to heredity and how much is (slack) hair care and lifestyle. I told him there are things you can do to not go as bald but he said he’s just given up.

I know there is some medicine you can take that prevents going bald even if you suffer from hereditary baldness. I used to work at a hair clinic and the doctor told me that. He said he himself takes that medicine and he has some of the thickest hair I’ve ever seen on a man his age.

And I told ex that. But he said he’s given up on his hair.

And then people say when women get old they lose their hair too and it gets weak and fragile and thin and breaks easily and falls off. And so I am fighting against that. Genetics helps, I’m blessed with very thick coarse hair so it doesn’t get as fragile and thin as easily.

But you still have to WORK to have great hair, especially after a certain age or certain life events (ie. pregnancy haha).

I still look at the hair I have today and the hair I had before my oldest son “Ermenegildo” was born and really, there’s no comparison. It doesn’t even look like the same hair.

I did have pretty thick hair before Ermenegildo was born too. But it was so strawlike and dry and damaged and fried from using hair dye every month. It had no shine at all and it looked stiff and hard. It did have a nice colour, it was redder than it is now because you can get a stronger colour on dark hair with artificial dyes than with henna.

But it was so stiff and dry. Today I have such soft hair and it’s shiny and has big bouncy curls.

But I do have to work harder than my ex to have that kind of hair. I have to henna every month because I do have grey hairs now, and also it is what I have to do if I want red hair and I am not a natural redhead.

I do try sometimes to go back to a simpler routine of just throwing in some laundry detergent into the washing machine and some fabric conditioner.

But then I KNOW all the gunk that is in the clothes, even if they come out soft thanks to the fabric conditioner and they smell nice. But I still KNOW all the gunk that is in the clothes and that will then go into your skin and then into your blood.

Laundry detergent is full of chemicals that can cause cancer and even if they don’t give you cancer they can still contribute to all kinds of medical conditions like heart probs, diabetes, high blood pressure, arteriosclerosis and a long list of etc’s.

Now that I KNOW what laundry detergent does to you when you wear it, well I mean when you wear clothes that have been washed in it, you just can’t NOT know about it anymore. And I KNOW what is in clothes that have been washed with laundry detergent.

And so on with everything else in life.

Which makes life complicated when you use natural products.

And I’d always wanted a simple life. But I guess we do not live in a simple world.

If you’d like to read about more complicated things in life, such as complicated and twisty plotlines, I’d love it if you checked out some of my thrillers. You can read about them here: Thrillers by Moi.

So do you use natural products? Do you find it complicates your life? Do leave me some comments down below. I LURRRVE to receive (positive, non-spammy) comments.

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