Arrows for Arrows

This post contains affiliate links. I may earn a commission if you purchase through a link, at no additional cost to you. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Little by little, over the last decade, we’ve made small changes around our home to cut down on toxic ingredients across the products we use the most. We’re nowhere near “perfect” (because what even would that be?!) but we have found that swapping out these simple non-toxic home products has actually forced us to live a simpler, slower life that we actually enjoy more than the chaotic, fast-paced one we used to swear by.

We want as much clean living as we can have, but we also want to steward the lives we’ve been given and not live in fear or paranoia. Spend enough time online and you’re bound to learn something unfortunate about the most recent clean swap you’ve made from someone out there, when all you wanted was a healthy home.

So, we often find ourselves asking these questions:

• How impactful will this non-toxic swap be in our daily lives?
• Is this a financially wise investment?
• Do we feasibly have the time to manage any lifestyle changes that come with this specific clean living choice?
• If we are saying we don’t have the time, is it because we are using time unwisely elsewhere?
• Will this swap cause more stress than it will help us?
• Can we bless others with this clean home choice?

You get the idea. Sure, the ideal is a homestead far from WiFi or EMFs or chemtrails and a way to purify our water straight out of the air and suck all the micro-plastics out of our vegetables with some brand new doo-hickey while wearing clothing that doesn’t disrupt any hormones and a breathing apparatus that removes icky ish from the air but, like…no. No, we don’t have the means for that today. And we’re called to live a life that shares Christ, so we’re not personally moving to the middle of nowhere any time soon.

But, within our God-given means, we are going to spend our time and money as wisely as we can to make the best decisions we currently can achieve without falling into self-condemnation.

Here’s a taste of our clean home shopping list!

Looking for a specific category? Jump to a section.

Cleaning | Eating | Clothing | Beauty & Grooming

Non-Toxic Cleaning Products

This is how I feel zero concern whilst teaching our daughter the valuable life skill of cleaning. I don’t need to whip out the gloves or worry about her nostrils filling with toxic fumes. I can send her to clean something and trust her hormones are good to go.

Branch basics ALL-PURPOSE CLEANER

No lie, about two months ago our pastor made an analogy about cleaning supplies during a sermon and mentioned, “And we all have these under our kitchen sink…” To which a friend of mine a row back whispered, “Not Michelle, she’s got Branch Basics.”

I had to choke back my laughter, as did several others, because, well, my friends know me.

So, girl, trust that I use and love Branch Basics.

The concentrate keeps on giving and replaces almost everything we clean with. Full disclosure, I keep Bar Keeper’s Friend, Bleach, and Dawn around for emergency situations but barely ever break them out.

One bottle of concentrate will make a ton of foaming hand soaps, glass cleaners, and general cleaners. I’ll be real again and say I don’t really need to make all the different “types” because the kitchen or bathroom spray is perfectly effective for pretty much everything.

I bought the spiffy Ultimate Kit a few years ago and it all is still working for me to this day. I bought the plastic bottle set because budget. Plus the plastic bottles have nice measuring lines to show you how much concentrate and how much water to use. So I’m not trading it.

Attitude DISH SOAP

I discovered Attitude while researching non-toxic home products while pregnant with our daughter. Attitude offers non-toxic swaps for both body and home. Our go-to for the last eight years has been their EWG-certified Dish Soap that you can buy in a cute, regular bottle or a refill mega box that saves money and reduces plastic waste.

SHAKLEE’S SCOUR OFF

I loooove the smell of this stuff. It reminds me of this cherry scented Barbie hair foam from the Golden Age, the 90’s. I use it to clean pots, pans, and the stove.

Since you need access to Shaklee (an MLM company) to order, here’s my link to a free membership and $10 off a purchase of $50 or more.

Whole Foods

We’re big on clean eating. What we eat is what our body has to rebuild with, it dictates so much of what energy we will have during the day, and it is our investment into the future of our bodies (along with movement). As we start focusing on whole foods (think less complicated ingredient lists) and home cooked meals, it has not only saved us money but also dictated a simpler schedule.

A lot of organic and clean eating can cost more than the more common things you find at the grocery store, so we’ve also taken a few steps even farther and DIY some things to save more and better control what’s in it all. Example include DIY vanilla extract, kefir water, sour dough, hot sauce, dried herbs, and fermented sauerkrauts, kimchis, and pickles.

This isn’t something we decided to do in a day, but ten years of smaller, intentional steps that have led us to where we are now. And we enjoy it! These are life skills we’re passing onto our kids and some of these make excellent gifts!

We Garden

I’m still learning how to balance pruning, plant spacing, and the areas I have that are safe from my nemesis, the deer. But, I can tell you I save us money on our cucumbers every year, thank you very much. As well as fresh herbs, tomatoes, and my husband’s love of extra spicy peppers (and thus hot sauce).

WE’re CHICKEN tenders

We have chickens. They give us eggs. This isn’t everyone’s ability, but we have enough eggs to eat, preserve, and feed others with.

ORGANIC

We buy in bulk and we buy on sale. Also, with less eating out, grocery foods are actually cheaper than our old food budget.

Thanks to FarmMatch.com, we have access to farm-direct goodies as well through their Private Membership Associations that value food freedom. Shout out to Rocky Ridge Dairy for our amazing A2/A2 Raw Milk. We pick it up at a home nearby once a week. They also provide bulk cuts of meat, fresh vegetables, their own homemade dairy products, and more if we need anything.

Our go-to stores are Costco, Whole Foods, Aldi, Trader Joes, our local Co-op, and Farm Match, as well as a few online farmers to buy bulk items (like honey) direct from a supplier.

banning the bigGIES

I’m married to someone who can be a bit of an all-or-nothing/go big or go home kind of guy. He has logical sense, so it doesn’t often get ridiculous (and if it does, it’s because I’m goading him on!), but when he commits, he commits. So, he knocked these biggies all at once while me and dear daughter took a little more time to adjust.

If you think you need to go bit by bit, I recommend this order:

1. Artificial Dyes – Nothing needs help being another color. Just give em up. Your body will thank you.
2. Artificial Flavors – Start training your tongue to appreciate what things actually taste like.
3. Artificial Preservatives – Buy things that will spoil faster closer to when you plan to eat them.
4. Highly Refined Sugars – We use maple syrup, honey, dates and date sugar, beets, agave, and occasional raw cane sugar in our cooking and when we buy food from the grocery store. When we’re at a restaurant, we do our best.
5. Seed Oils – Seed oils are everywhereeeee, even in health food stores. We cook with tallow, lard, butter, avocado oil, and EVOO (extra virgin olive oil).

But, what do you do when you eat out?

We don’t go to a lot of the places we used to go and treat eating out as much more of a treat (read: it’s either a much fancier occasion or it’s a healthier restaurant, or both). Some of our go-tos that give us some wins (read: some, not all.) are Mezze, Buffalo Wild Wings, Sweet Green, Steakhouses, and farm-to-table places that probably use seed oils but at least the other ingredients are pretty solid.

Because we have cut down so much on these things, eating out doesn’t need to be a big stress point.

We’ve used ingredient lists to learn to read and explore biology by way of the impact of certain ingredients on the body, whether helpful or not. Cooking and growing food at home also teach life skills, biology, botany, nutrition, and culinary arts.

CLEAN SWAPS

Did you know, for example, that you can buy soy sauce with and without sodium benzoate? Sodium benzoate can convert into a carcinogen and can also cause inflammation. Yet, you can get soy sauce without it for the same price at the same size. So that’s what we do.

We love Smash Food’s jam and Hu chocolate chips for desserts. Note: Hu’s chocolate chips are $10/bag, but we aren’t cranking out chocolate chip cookies every day and a bag will last us 2-3 treats like a favorite of ours, Nut Butter Mousse or chocolate chip pancakes because the chips are extra large.

Clean Textiles

We still have a ton of synthetic fabrics in our closets. However, moving forward we’re focused on buying cottons, linens, and wools as often as we can for items we wear the most.

I love Branwyn for merino wool bralettes (and they are great while nursing, too).

We buy cotton underwear from places like Quince, gradually replacing the undies we’ve accrued over the years that are synthetic materials.

Wool and alpaca socks, little by little, going into the drawers for us adults. Cotton socks for the kiddos. We also wear barefoot shoes often enough that we don’t need many socks. We keep em fresh with this deodorizer.

Our sheets are linen, and our children each have one set of GOTS certified organic cotton sheets (early morning washings on wash days) from MakeMake Organics. Check out their full, lovely selection here.

I used to have a polyester duvet cover for our daughter’s bed but I realized I have a cotton quilt my grandmother made me that I passed down to her. I want to try out quilting and make our son a quilt, too.

We check the local thrift store for 100% cotton onesies for our boy and cotton dresses and shirts for our girl.

We can’t always go as far as OEKOTEX or GOTS, but we can do cotton instead of polyester. Women’s fashion is a huge offender since there’s so much cool stuff you can do with synthetic fabrics. Thus, I want to focus on better fabric for my most worn go-tos and don’t care as much for things I only wear a few times a year or on top of other things.

Clean Beauty & Grooming

Since these are the items going in or on us, we have tried a lot of non-toxic products to find some that work for us and don’t include a ton of chemicals we don’t want or need.

Here are our favorite non-toxic clean beauty picks:

Replace lotion with tallow

I love the impact tallow has on my skin. It just eats it up and leaves me feeling super soft and moisturized! I buy from a few brands, but Wrath & Remedy and Amallow are readily available on Amazon. I love Vanilla and Coffee scents, or a tried and true unscented.

clean Deodorant

We accept that we sweat from our pits and don’t bother looking for an antiperspirant anymore. Clean eating and detoxing definitely controls a lot of body odor, but we still use a deodorant. We love Real Purity’s Roll on because it works, and so many other alternatives just disappointed us.

Tallow Lip Balm

I was a 90s Lip Smacker girl like everyone else, but now we just use more tallow. You can use your whipped tallow or something a bit more convenient to carry like these from Tallowbourne. We’ve noticed we don’t need chapstick as much now that we hydrate more. Go figure! So these last forever.

plastic-free Boar bristle & bamboo Toothbrushes

Goodbye, plastics! We use some simple toothbrushes from N-amboo that wear out after several months, which is an easy way to remember to replace them. I like the good, manual clean and they are much lighter and smaller when traveling than our old electric brushes.

NON-TOXIC Baby Wash

Like I mentioned earlier, we love Attitude. They make body washes for babies and the rest of us. Here’s the one we use for Maverick.

CLEAN BODY WASH

We love that Attitude offers the refillable boxes of body wash so that we get more bang for our buck. There are several scents available, including unscented.

TOOTHPASTE

We’re currently in the midst of researching hydroxyapetate and charcoal and several other ingredients, so I’m not comfy suggesting a toothpaste right now. I’ll drop a link when we land on our own choice.

non-toxic, ewg-verified makeup

I love the Well People brand. It’s EWG verified, saving me time.

Primer | Concealer | Mascara | Eyebrow Pencil | Setting Spray

Well People also sells bronzing powder, lip tints, eye gels, and more that I can’t speak to since I don’t use them. Maybe one day I’ll more so know what I’m doing in the makeup space, but for now this set of five gets the job done.

Do you have some non-toxic favorites you’re willing to share! I’d love to hear about them! Let us know in the comments.

♡, Michelle

If you think this post is useful, it would mean a ton if you helped pass it on by sharing wherever you think it’ll help the most!