About My Soap
All my soaps are made with skin-loving oils and butters and are full of natural glycerins (which is one reason for their luxurious feel). Most are scented with 100% pure essential oils. My colorants are generally high-quality micas, clays or other botanicals.
Most "soaps" at the store are actually detergent bars (ever notice how many of them are called "beauty bars" and other euphemisms? They cannot legally be labelled soap!) and even when they are real soaps, supermarket brands often have had their valuable glycerin removed (to make lotions and other products), making them inferior to natural, hand-crafted soaps).
Optimistic soaps made the old-fashioned way (a process that dates back to ancient Roman days), by saponifying natural oils (like coconut oil, cocoa butter, olive oil and more) with sodium hydroxide, commonly known as lye.
Wait. Is my soap made with lye? Yes, it is. By definiton, ALL soap is made with lye (or similar alkaline solution). No lye = not soap.
When soap is made correctly, all the lye has been processed out of it. What is left is mild, conditioning and cannot be matched by any other cleansing product . Anyone who claims to be selling "lye-free" soap may have purchased blocks of pre-made ("melt and pour" or "glycerin") soap and may not realize that what they purchased was originally made with oils and butters saponified with lye.
All my soaps are 100% palm-free, an inexpensive oil found in many food and beauty products whose production some believe is harmful to the environment and has led to a crisis with endangered species.
Ingredients
My basic recipe, which took years to hone, is not a vegetarian recipe, however, after YEARS of honing my craft, I believe that this soap is excellent, but I also provide some vegan soaps (they all include "(vegan)" in their names).
My basic recipe contains: saponified lard, coconut oil, olive oil, cocoa butter and castor oil. Additionally my soaps are scented with essential oils or fragrance oils and colored with micas.
My vegan recipe contains: saponified rice bran oil, coconut oil, cocoa butter, coconut milk, castor oil, avocado oil. Additionally my soaps are scented with essential oils or fragrance oils and colored with micas.
My shampoo bar contains: saponified canola oil, coconut oil, castor oil, cocoa butter, sunflower oil and jojoba oil. It is fragranced with rosemary and peppermint essential oils.
