DIY natural deodorant… island style

So whilst browsing reviews and comparisons of various parabens/aluminium free deodorants available and considering the price tags attached to many of them (Israeli Lavalin 7 day deodorant cream is really tempting!) and my budget, I thought about what local products are available here in the Caribbean and what I could use to de-odorise my stinky pits!

It’s really hot here.  Like 31 C ALL THE  TIME!  I brought no less than 5 different types of deodorant with me:

• Te Horo Lavender Hydrosol deodorant
• Miisel deodorant I got in Brisbane
• Beldi Boutique Natural Deodorant (which seems to have stopped selling since 2014?  How long have I had this lying around?)
• Kiehl’s Superbly Effective Deodorant (which, has aluminium in it)
• Tom’s Long Lasting 24 hour unscented

 

 

Unfortunately, the only one that really works and keeps me not smelling like a dirty hippy is the aluminium loaded Kiehls! So I try to only wear it when I have something important to do that I can’t be smelly for.  Though, the Beldi Boutique comes in 2nd place for stink prevention.  It’s ingredients are:

• Organic Argan Oil
• Coconut Oil
• Shea butter
• Bicarbonate Soda (baking soda)
• Bees Wax
• Arrowroot Powder
• Tea Tree, Eucalyptus, Peppermint and Lavender essential oils

 

I can’t remember how much I paid for this Beldi Boutique Deodorant, but it was probably $15 NZ or about $30 EC.  With shipping, the other products I was looking at buying would run me at least $15 USD for the cheapest (and probably least effective) natural deodorant, which is about $45 EC.

The rest are pretty crap and I really need to find something else to use when I run out of the 2 that work.

Did you know that the Caribbean is one of the largest produces of Arrowroot powder?  And Coconut oil!  And lots of nice smelling spices!

And apparently arrowroot is great for deodorant!  And so is coconut oil!

So, I bought some virgin coconut oil ($15 EC) and about $3 EC worth of Arrowroot powder, and $1.50 for a giant bunch of local rosemary, and I had some local cloves lying around.

Rosemary is antibacterial (in addition to smelling nice) and cloves are antiseptic (in addition to smelling nice).

Coconut oil is also antibacterial, and:

“Arrowroot has incredible anti-inflammatory, absorbent and healing properties that give it multiple cosmetic and medicinal uses. In fact its name, arrowroot, is derived from its original purpose, which was as a treatment for poison arrow injuries. Today, it is still used to treat many wounds.”
 https://williamspromakeup.com/everything-you-need-to-know-about-arrowroot-powder/

Now, I am infusing the coconut oil with the rosemary and cloves while I am away for the next 2 weeks, and when I come back I will strain the coconut oil, and add the arrowroot powder, and hopefully beeswax (though the honey lady told me this time of year it’s hard to get beeswax, I might have to wait).  I am a little worried that the rosemary and cloves might be a bit harsh for sensitive skin, so hopefully I didn’t overdo it.  If it works well, I could have a new product on my hands and start selling at the Castries market to tourists!

I was contemplating adding some lime zest for added antibacterial properties but was worried the citrus oils might make it even harsher… so I will wait and give it a trial run and see how I go first!  Either way, soon I will have my own home made deodorant!

 

Speaking of natural deodorant, I did see a sign advertising “local natural deodorant” at one of the pharmacy’s in town, and I checked it out.  It was $15 EC and seemed like it was mostly alcohol.  I tried to sniff it through the plastic bag it was sealed in and the aroma was distinctly… Old Spice meets Dish Soap disgusting!  I don’t know why they would put so much strong artificial perfume in something meant to be “natural”… ?

 

 

2016 – Hurricane Nicole Gaston

Hurricane season in the Eastern Caribbean is nearly upon us and when looking at the list of 2016 hurricane names I found my name strangely reflected; they must have known I was coming here?

Since 1953, Atlantic tropical storms had been named from lists originated by the National Hurricane Center. They are now maintained and updated through a strict procedure by an international committee of the World Meteorological Organization.

http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/aboutnames.shtml

Atlantic Tropical Storm Names for 2016

2016
Alex Bonnie Colin Danielle Earl Fiona Gaston Hermine Ian Julia Karl Lisa Matthew Nicole Otto Paula Richard Shary Tobias Virginie Walter

Hopefully we don’t get to 14 hurricanes in 2016, but if we did… it would maybe be kind of cool?

 

This is how we brew it

So, my attempts to capture wild yeast seems to have worked, because my ginger beer/wine/whatever is fermenting!

 

So here is my detailed ginger beer/wine technique, which will hopefully yield something nice!

I will post a full update when I have sampled the first brew!

 

So, I began by creating a ginger bug.

I did this following Sandor Katz’s method in “Wild Fermentation”.  My library (Wellington City Libraries) has an ebook copy of Wild Fermentation available on Overdrive; if your library doesn’t own an e-copy, you can request they buy it (hooray for patron driven acquisition!).

 

My bug started bubbling after about 2 days, because it’s so hot here.  One piece of additional advice I have is to place your bug in some kind of “moat” (a shallow dish of water) to stop ants from getting in! I failed to do so and had a number of ants swimming around a separate container of honey wine (tej – also a recipe from Wild Fermentation) ferment mere minutes after putting it out on the bench 😦  A week later it was covered in mould.  But the ants seemed to stay out of the ginger bug, though I didn’t want to risk it so it put it in a moat anyway.

After 3 days, the bug stopped bubbling, and I was concerned it was dead.  But, since I had already made the ginger syrup  (recipe below) I decided I would try to put it all together anyway and see what happened.

6 days after starting the bug, and 3 days after it had stopped bubbling (despite following the feeding instructions above), I mixed most of the bug with a syrup made from ginger and sugar.

Ginger syrup recipe

I put a large ginger root in the blender with about 2 cups of water.

Then I boiled that with 2 cups of “brown” sugar (see my previous post for an explanation) for 15 minutes.

I let it cool, then strained it and put it in the fridge until I was ready to mix it with the bug.

 

Sterilising the equipment

I took a large 5 L water bottle and filled it with tap water and 3 tbs bleach.

I let that sit for about 8 hours (it probably doesn’t need to sit that long but I got distracted).

Then I emptied the bottle, rinsed it with filtered water, and tried to let it air dry as best I could.

I cut a little hole in the cap of the water bottle and jammed the airlock bung in it, then jammed the airlock in, and let that sit in a very weak bleach solution for about 1 hour, and then rinsed it with filtered water.  The cap and the airlock don’t actually touch your brew so this step isn’t essential, but I thought I might as well sterilise them.

 

Mixing the bug with the syrup

Then I added the chilled syrup to about 4 L of filtered water and about 9/10ths of the liquid from the ginger bug (which was about 1.25 cups of liquid at that point).

Then, I screwed the lid on the bottle very tightly with the airlock 1/2 full of a bit of filtered water.

 

(I then started a new ginger bug using the last 10th of the bug liquid and 1 tsp of leftover ginger solids, to which I added 2 tsp of sugar, 2 tsp of fresh ginger, and about 1.5 cups of water in a glass covered with a piece of toilet paper (hobo ginger bug!).)

You can see the photo above of my new ginger bug which seems to be fairly yeasty.

 

It’s been about 5 days and already the ginger wine/beer is fermenting fairly vigourously.  Considering that it only has about 2 cups of sugar (plus any natural sugar from the ginger),  in 4 L of liquid, I have no idea how strong this is going to be.  I think it will be around 5% based on reading a recipe that used 1.5 cups of sugar and a gallon of water that said it would be 3-4%. I don’t have a hydrometer so I will just have to guess based on how merry I feel after a bottle!

So far… so good, but I am fairly concerned I will get some mould growing on it too, but as of yet I don’t see any signs of mould (fingers crossed!).

It is actually looking like cider in a fermenter at home pitched with commercial yeast.

However because I couldn’t boil the ginger bug (it would kill the wild yeast) and the ginger syrup did sit in the fridge for a day or two before I mixed it with the water… there was lots of potential for contamination happening.

I am leaving Friday for 2 weeks, and hopefully when I come home it will be ready to bottle.

(Update – 6 June, it’s still fermenting away! I have no idea how much longer it will be bubbling for.)

I will know it is ready to bottle when it stops bubbling.  My plan for bottling is to use a bunch of these 200 ml plastic bottles I have that I buy soda water in.  I figure the soda water is sterile, and as long as I pour it into a glass (don’t put my mouth on the bottle) and then screw the lid back on tightly, I can re-use them without sterilising them.  Though if I am concerned I can use the bleach/water solution.

My next decision will be around carbonation and sweetening.  I want to add at least a little sugar to each bottle before sealing for carbonation.  The yeast will have eaten all the sugar in the fermenter (5 L bottle), but when they get exposed to more they will eat it and turn it into carbonation.  However, if you put too much sugar, the bottles could explode because the yeast will just keep eating!  So how do you get sweet but sparkling cider?

There are a few easy methods, but I am not sure which is best.

They are

• chilling,
• pasteurisation, or
• sweetening them with a non-caloric sweeter, like Stevia or Xylitol.

You can also do things like “back sweetening” but I don’t fully understand those processes so I can’t speak of how they work, but they seem complicated!

• Artificial sweeteners seem to be either carcinogens (like Aspartame), taste gross (stevia leaf), or really expensive (commercial Stevia sweetners).  But, they provide sweetness to the drink without feeding the yeast and getting turned into alcohol.
• The other option of pasteurising involves putting a certain amount of sugar into the bottle that is enough to sweeten it and add carbonation.  When the yeasts have eaten enough of the sugar to reach the desired carbonation level, you put the sealed bottles in a bath of water at about 70 C for 10 minutes.  The heat kills the yeast and stops them from making more carbonation and exploding the bottle or making more alcohol.  ….But I am not sure if plastic bottles can stand 70 C water for 10 minutes.  This would work well if I were using glass bottles.
• So the 3rd option is again, adding a certain amount of sugar into the bottle that is enough to sweeten it and add carbonation. However, instead of pasteurising the bottles to kill the yeast when it is sufficiently carbonated, instead you put the bottles in the fridge, where the cold temperature will stop the yeast from carrying on eating the sugars.  However, if you have limited fridge space (like I do) this is maybe not the best option, and even at 12 C or whatever temperature your fridge is at, the yeast can still be active, just a lot slower.  So, you do have to drink all the ginger beer fairly quickly or you risk explosions…

With all of these methods you have to guess how much sweetness and carbonation you want.  A 750 ml beer will usually call for 1/2 tsp pf sugar to be added to each bottle to carbonate it.  For the little 250 ml bottles I will be using I have no idea how much sugar to add to carbonate it and sweeten it slightly.  I will probably also make a few bottles or a dry ginger beer with no added sweetness, just a pinch of sugar to carbonate.

The bottles should be carbonated after about 2 weeks, so I should have an update here around late June!

There is no homebrew store here so I can’t get no-rinse steriliser, yeast (other than bread yeast), or bottle caps for glass bottles.  So, I am making do with what I have available, and harvesting wild yeast!  They also don’t really grow any grains locally (other than corn), wheat flour is imported from Barbados, oats from Jamaica, and most other stuff from the USA or Trinidad.  Hops would probably grow here, but I don’t know where to get seeds from! Ginger, mango, passionfruit, guava, and banana are plentiful, so I am having fun experimenting with ciders for now.  I’d like to do a passionfruit mango guava cider next!

As mentioned above, I will post an update when I have sampled my first brew!

 

 

 

St. Lucia Hot Couture 2016

A few weeks after arriving in St. Lucia I heard a radio advertisement while riding in a bus for “Hot Couture”, a fashion show that was being held as part of the St. Lucia Jazz and Arts Festival.

On the radio, the principal organiser of the event was discussing her intention to showcase St. Lucian and Caribbean designers and creativity.  It sounded like an awesome endeavour – one that I wanted to be involved in!  Since I have a lot more free time than I have had the last few years, I contacted the organiser and asked if they were in need of volunteers.  Warwick and I have volunteered several times at Womad and other festivals, and I helped out with Frocks on Bike’s “Wheel Stylish” fashion show a few years in a row, and have been on several conference organising committees, so I felt like I had some skills in events and planning and could hopefully make some kind of contribution to an event promoting creativity and ingenuity in St. Lucia, two things very important to me!

The organisers, Cinnamon Productions, where very receptive to my volunteer enquiry, and I met with the team during one of their model training sessions to discuss what my role could be.  Yes I was the shortest, fattest person there, but I did not let that intimidate me!  From that day, I became a part of the production team, and began attending meetings regularly for the following 4 weeks as the show approached, and while it was a lot of time, and work, for me Hot Couture 2016 was a truly wonderful experience.

After arriving in St. Lucia not knowing a soul, being dropped in a random Castries suburb by Peace Corps, and told “go make friends”when I had no way  to even meet people, working with Cinnamon Productions I met a bunch of awesome people, from the production team, the models, the hair and make up staff, and many more, all working together to achieve a shared vision celebrating Caribbean design.

Before coming to St. Lucia, and hearing that bus radio ad, I had never head of Hot Couture, and I had no real knowledge of its history or how it was organised in the past.  Quickly I realised that while the event was in it’s 4th or 5th year of production, this was the first year Cinnamon Productions was involved.  From what I gather, Cinnamon Productions are the foremost organisers of fashion-related events in St. Lucia, and the head of the organisation is also a former model, having worked in the industry for over 30 years.

She definitely knew how to pull of  fashion show on a huge scale, from top to bottom, every aspect of the show’s requirements behind the scenes.  I honestly don’t know how she did it.  There is so much involved that I would never have thought of.  She recruited people new to modelling and trained them, organised the venue, and selected the designers who would be showing their work.  Organisationally, the style was very different from what I was used to, with shared Google spreadsheets and group emails.  Instead we only met face to face, and did all our organising with pen and paper.  In my previous experiences the organisation and use of ICT made planning much more efficient, but that was New Zealand/USA/Canada, and this is St. Lucia.  I am not St. Lucian, and my opinion doesn’t really reflect how things work here! So, I adapted and saved my judgements for the final show.

Which was awesome!

The days leading up to the show involved model fittings, welcoming designers, and lots of madness.  But all in all the final show was really a Masterpiece!

Model fittings

Fittings the day before the runway

Tying a head wrap just before the show

Hair and make up

Hair and make up

Hair and make up

Hair and make up

Hair and make up

Hair and make up

 

Dwight Eubanks and model

Belasse – St. Lucian born designer working in America

Kim Charlery, St. Lucian Designer

Sean Graeves, St. Lucian Designer

The images above show some of the backstage activity and runway highlights.  I really enjoyed seeing many local St. Lucian designers featured, and designers from Barbados and St. Vincent, like Nefertari and Kimon.

A close friend of the organiser was brought in from America to do hair for the girls in the show.  At one point during the pre-show preparations he addressed the female models saying “You are showing all the little black girls all over the world how beautiful they can be”.  I thought that was an apt and touching sentiment that echoed throughout the event’s activities for me.

Yes there were some issues, namely the lighting and the sound technicians who were completely unprofessional and failed to do their job to the standard required.  And yes, the backstage area where I was working was complete chaos – due largely to the fact that no one really knew what was going on, and issues with the venue’s events staff being unreliable (Maybe Sandals Grande is good at organising weddings, but not the largest fashion show in the country).  Contractors turned up late, people ignored the ushers and sat where they wanted, these things were out of the control of the organisers.  But overall the night was a success, and a great experience for me to be involved in such a large event.

The following day there was a trunk show organised for Serenity Park in Castries,  and several free public workshops given by the visiting designers, held in tandem with the other activities.  Oh and I was on TV, apparently, though I didn’t see it!  And then I was exhausted.

St. Lucians seem to like drama.  Hey, I like a good bit of gossip as much as the next girl, but what I have seen has really gone beyond what I would expect for grown up adults.  Like this article, and a number of Facebook posts by the previous year’s organiser, who seems to be very bitter he was not organising it this year, and making disparaging comments about an event he didn’t even attend?  It’s just immature and unprofessional.

 

All of this negative publicity really offends me. People expected to be involved or get free tickets, and when they didn’t, they complain on social media.

Hater’s gonna hate… but on a serious note,this type of petty behaviour is a barrier to designers in the region becoming successful.  How do you even navigate this type of slander and petty bullshit when you just want to be creative and make stuff?  It’s like a minefield out there, I really pity anyone who has to deal with such awful small minded people who can’t even make a single positive comment or provide and useful contrastive criticism.  I just hope that the talented, creative, hard working people I met can rise above these challenging contexts.  Because they really have some amazing voices and visions badly needed by an industry that is largely white and middle-class, and ethically has a lot to answer for.   The industry desperately needs increased diversity of designers represented on an international scale, this is the 21st century, and we live in a global and multi-cultural society.

It’s awesome to see so many empowered designers of colour making amazing stuff, but so sad to see the embattled terrain of oppression and what I would describe as hate speech they have to endure to get their visions out there.  However, I can’t help but wonder at what level institutionalised racism has led to a situation in which people attack each other rather than work together, leading to further class and race disparity.  I can only comment on what I perceive through the lens of my white middle-classness, a perspective I have the foresight to knowledge, and I do reflect upon it, and how it influences my opinions presented here.

But on a final note, seriously people, can’t you all just love each other and work together for the greater good of diversity and inclusivity in fashion on a global scale?  As an industry it is pretty evil, your voices can only help it redress past sins!

 

Fermentation failures

So about 6 days ago I used the recipe from Wild Fermentation to make Tej (honey wine) and a ginger bug.

Today they were both looking pretty sad.

The Tej is mouldy, and the ginger bug is not bubbling.

But, I decided to go ahead and try and make some ginger wine anyway, since I had already made the ginger syrup, before I realised my ginger bug was dead.

Surprisingly, a few hours after mixing the ginger syrup and water and ginger bug, there seems to be some fermentation action happening, even though by all appearances my ginger bug was not active!

As for the Tej, I think I will have to just throw it away 😦 A waste of $15 EC of local Dennery Honey!

A few issues that might have caused the mould:

a.) ants got into the Tej mere minutes after I set it on the bench to gather yeast and ferment. Then I put it into a little moat to stop any others getting in, but it was probably doomed from then on.  Even though I trie dot remove any ants, there is still at least one dead one floating the jar.

b.) I was keeping my (mouldy) compost in an open bowl on the same bench as my ferments.

c.) it’s 30 C all the time here, maybe stuff behaves differently?

I also don’t know why the ginger bug seemed so inactive. It bubbled a lot the first 2-3 days after initial mixing (1 cup filtered water, 2 tsp fresh ginger, 2 tsp sugar), and I fed it 2 tsp sugar and 2 tsp grated ginger every other day since first making it, but despite browsing countless “ginger bug help” and “ginger bug troubleshooting” websites, I couldn’t not figure out what I had done wrong.  So about 12 hours after mixing most of what seemed like a dead ginger bug with:

Ginger Syrup

• 2 cups “brown” sugar – this is local St. Lucian sugar, labeled as brown, but probably actually Demerara sugar?  It’s cheaper than the white caster sugar, so I think less processed.  I really don’t know!
• A largeish ginger root jazzed up in the blender with 2 cups water.

 

I boiled that for 15 minutes, cooled, then strained.

and about 4 L filtered water, with the (dead) ginger bug, this morning,  in a 5 L water bottle (that I previous had a sterilising bleach-water solution soaking in for a few days), with the airlock on, some bubbling is happening.  Whether it is mould growing, fermenting happening, or some other weird tropical thing, I have no idea!

 

 I’m looking forward to seeing how my ginger wine develops in the next few days before I head to Chicago on Friday for 2 weeks.

I will post an update upon my return!

 

Some pictures of my dinner and my attempt at making salted caramel.

 

The salted caramel turned out a bit more like Dulche de leche – I bought some “fat free” half and half on special at GL Foods in Rodney Bay and used that, along with some butter and more of that local St. Lucian “brown” sugar using Jamie Oliver’s salted caramel recipe, but it ended up a lot more liquid than expected, so I boiled it an extra five minutes.

The result is FUCKING DELICIOUS!  I could just sit and eat the tub of it.  But I will try and control myself.

 “Lazy pizza” is what happens when you don’t feel like making a tomato pizza sauce, so instead to just slice up some tomatoes and put them on pizza dough…it’s really not as nice as proper pizza sauce.  But I was tired, and the stove is hot, and it’s 31 C right now.