Episode 128: Cleaning Your Home Naturally

doterra: Have you ever thought about how strange it is that cleaning products—the things that are supposed to help us keep our house safe—come with a warning label? Well, today, we're exploring your options for natural cleaning.

Welcome back to Essential Oil Solutions with doTERRA, the podcast where you'll hear exciting, useful, and simple everyday uses for essential oils from experts in the field. If you like what you hear today, rate, review, and subscribe wherever you listen. We always appreciate hearing from you.

Today, we're excited to talk to Sarah MacMillan about natural cleaning solutions. Sarah, thank you so much for being here with us today.

Sarah MacMillan: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. I'm very excited.

doTERRA: Well, my first question for you is kind of a big one, and that is why do the cleaning products that I use matter?

Sarah: Well, I started really reading about how important these cleaning products are when I had my girls. I had twins, and I had just started with doTERRA a few years prior to that. I really started to change my habits drastically when I started reading about the air quality in houses.

And I read that it was like—something like two to five times more polluted than the air outside of the house, due to the chemicals in our cleaning products. And I was so shocked. I had no idea it was this bad. I had heard about it. You know, you hear about things here and there, but you don't really read about it.

So I started really diving into this matter when I had my girls, and they were babies, and they started crawling. So I started realizing how important it is to use all-natural products, which we'll talk about later in the podcast. But I've always suffered from allergies. My girls have allergies, and it was pretty much getting even worse with all these products that I was always used to cleaning with.

doTERRA: Now, once we've recognized that maybe there are some products that aren't very good for us, that aren't helping us or our families, how do we know if the cleaning products we are using are natural? How can we recognize that?

Sarah: As you start reading, as I said, you start really realizing that it's all marketing, right? I think in my path I started really looking for products that said natural or organic on the labels. And then I realized that these terms usually mislead us to think that the product is safer or it's more environmentally friendly or responsible. But it's actually—there's no regulation for the word’s use.

doTERRA: Wow.

Sarah:It's when you really start thinking about other options. If cleaning products are so easy to make, why don't we just make them ourselves?

doTERRA: Now, that leads me to my next question, because you mentioned, you know, maybe cleaning products are really easy to make on your own. If I want to clean my house naturally, does that mean that I have to make all of my own cleaners?

Sarah: I think you do, you know, pretty much. I've asked around, and I've read, and I've read a lot. And it comes down to understanding that the best natural cleaning products are just regular white vinegar and baking soda, you know, using a little citrus in it—maybe a little Wild Orange, maybe Lemon. And you can make them with so many other things.

So these are the basics, you know, and people say that all the time. But I think we're so used to using chemicals in our cleaners that if our house doesn't smell like Clorox, we don't really feel that it's clean. You know, a lot of us grew up with all these really harsh cleaners that—yeah, but if it doesn't smell this way, then I'm not really cleaning. I'm not really getting my house the way that I want to do it. But I mean, you can use many things. You can use castile soap, white vinegar, baking soda, citric acid, witch hazel—so many things that we can use to create these products. It's very easy.

doTERRA: I think you're absolutely right. And I think they are things that have been tried and tested for hundreds of years that people have been using to clean with. Sarah, my final question for you is how do I incorporate essential oils into this routine? How can I use essential oils to help keep my house clean?

Sarah: I love essential oils. I use them. I love them. doTERRA has amazing oils for cleaning. You know, they have the On Guard. It's so effective as an all-purpose surface cleaner.

You can use Purify. I love Purify. I love to use it in my kitchen. I love to use it with cotton balls and put them in the air vents to help purify the air.

I use Lemon a lot. Lemon, I use it with my all-purpose as well. Sometimes you can just mix and match some essential oils. And it's also a great oil to polish your furniture, which a lot of people don't know. You just use a little bit of Lemon with Fractionated Coconut Oil.

Wild orange. I love that one. And Wild Orange is maybe one of my top oils in my kitchen.

So, like, Oregano. Like people say, “Okay, I'm using essential oils, but I really need a deep cleaning.” Well, then you just use Oregano.

So it's kind of knowing all the properties of the oils and just really doing it yourself and going online and reading. You guys have amazing blogs that you give us all of these, you know, all of the recipes. It’s just pretty much going in and looking at them, but essential oils, for me, have really changed my life. I had no idea that I could create to mop my floor recipe, you know or my dishwasher tabs, or—I don't know. I use it for everything in my house. It's just a matter of finding the oils that work for certain things that you really need to be cleaned and then finding the smell that you want in each room, you know because there's a lot of oils that work for different things and some of them work for the same things.

And so it's just pretty much, “Okay, I don't want to use this one anymore. What other one can I use this month to just change out the smells?” Not that we do that for the normal cleaners. I don't know why we're so into all these smells with the do-it-yourself cleaners and all the natural ones that we're doing. But I've noticed that to create all of the cleaning products in my house because I do this every—well, some of them obviously run out faster than the other ones. It usually takes me maybe every month or two months, about 40 minutes to make everything. That's not bad.

Sarah: That's not bad. And I mean, I have girls, so I've been teaching them how to do the cleaning products, you know, and they love mixing and doing it. And I know that when they go to college, they're going to remember this. They're going to remember us doing all of these cleaning products. They're going to—every time we make them, I tell them a little bit more about how important it is with our health, how important it is with the environment.

You know, everything that we use goes into the water again. It ends up in the rivers. It ends up in the oceans. It ends up killing all these animals. So it's been a good time for me to really just share a little bit more consciousness, not only by having organic and natural products but what impact we're having on the planet.

doTERRA: I think that's absolutely right. I love that philosophy. Sarah, thank you so much for talking with us today, for sharing a little bit of education about how to use these amazing essential oils to help keep our house clean.

Sarah: Thank you so much! Thank you. I loved being here.

doTERRA: Thanks for joining us and congratulations on living a healthier lifestyle with essential oils. If you liked what you heard today, rate, review, and subscribe wherever you listen. Also, if you want to try any of the products you learned about, go to doterra.com or find a Wellness Advocate near you to place an order today.