This recipe for Natural in-wash scent boosters couldn’t be easier – they can be made with as little as 2 ingredients, they make your washing smell fabulous, they also help soften your washing and don’t contain the cocktail of chemicals that the leading brand does.
What’s so wrong with the leading brand?
Well, if we ignore the price (Lenor Unstoppables retail at between £4.00 and £8.00 in the UK) and just look at the ingredients, there are a few reasons why you might want to swap to a more natural scent booster.
It’s pretty hard to find out what the ingredients actually are – on Amazon, the ingredients are Perfumes, Benzyl Salicylate, Butylphenyl Methylpropional, Citronellol, Eugenol Hexyl. Cinnamal and Limonene. If you google all of the above, they appear to be naturally occurring ingredients, making the unstoppables sound like quite a natural product.
However, if you look at a supermarket website, they list a lot more ingredients that fall under the ‘perfumes’ title that Lenor list.
Sainsbury’s, Asda and Tesco all list the following ingredients and warning:
Harmful to aquatic life with long lasting effects. Keep out of reach of children. IF SWALLOWED: Immediately call a doctor. Contains Citronellol, Limonene, Hexyl Salicylate, Hexyl cinnamal, Tetramethyl Acetyloctahydronaphthalenes, Benzyl salicylate, Allyl Cyclohexylpropionate, 2,4-Dimethyl-3-Cyclohexene Carboxaldehyde. May produce an allergic reaction.
The above list of ingredients is larger than you can find on the bottle itself and I honestly couldn’t find a list on Lenor’s website. It also might not be 100% exhaustive.
How to make natural in-wash scent boosters:
You need 2 ingredients.
Kosher or rock salt and natural essential oils. That’s it.
The reason why you should kosher or rock salt (I used kosher) is because the size of the salt granules is larger and therefore they will take longer to dissolve in your wash. If you use table salt, it will dissolve earlier in your wash and therefore the fragrance could be washed out. Using larger granules means that the fragrance will last in your wash longer and your washing will still be fragrant at the end of the spin cycle.
Do not use Epsom salts! Some recipes will suggest you use them, however, Epsom salts are different from normal salts. Table salt is sodium chloride and Epsom salt is magnesium sulfate. Epsom Salts actually make your water harder which is no good for your washing machine.
The directions are easy and straight forward. You will need:
- Kosher or Rock Salt
- Natural Essential Oils
- Glass or pottery container
- Non-porous mixing bowl and spoon (either pot or glass)
First of all, fill your storage container with salt, using a cup measure and work out how many cups the container will hold.
Simply add 20-30 drops of essential oils per cup of salt. If you don’t have cups but you do have weighing scales, use the same amount of oils per 270g of salt.
Add the salt to your non-porous bowl, add and measure the amount of essential oils and mix.
Transfer the salt to your storage container and you’re done. Leave it at least 4 hours for the fragrance to develop before you use the scent booster but ideally, overnight. The fragrance will continue to develop but if you feel that it has reduced, just add a few more drops, mix it up and it’ll be ready to go. I however empty my jar with no need to re-fragrence.
I generally add about a table spoon of the scent boosters to the drum of my washing machine with each wash. My container holds 2.5 cups of salt and that equates to 40 washes.
Price.
I bought 1.36kg of Kosher Salt for £6.95. Just over 5 cups of salt, so over 80 washes. About £3.00 per container of 40 washes and less than a penny per wash.
The lemon oil cost me £7.95 for 100ml. There are approximately 20 drops in a millimetre and so using 60 drops would equate to 3ml.
£7.95 / 100ml = 0.0795 per millimetre x 3ml = 0.2p per container of 40 washes.
All in all, the recipe costs less than 1p per wash.
I can’t tell you how many washes are in a bottle of Lenor Unstoppables but I think you’re looking at about 20 washes maximum in a £6.00 bottle. That would equate to about 3p per wash, making them at least 3 times as expensive.
If you’d like to make these scent boosters yourself, I’ve also made a label that you can download.
I hope you find this recipe useful – please do leave a comment and let me know how you get on if you do try it.
Love,
Hannah Spannah