Soap!

Let me tell you a little something about myself: in the past few years, I’ve found that my desire to make things has become insatiable.

When I watch baking shows, I think, “that doesn’t look too hard with enough practice. I think I can make a three tiered decorated cake.” When I wade through the endless craft fair display ideas on Pinterest, I think, “I can definitely build that… if I had a power drill.”

This curiosity and desire to learn how to make all the things has really honed in on the products I use on myself mainly because I have very sensitive skin. What is commercial soap made of? It can’t be too mysterious and difficult to do seeing as I already know a few artisanal soap makers and the craft has been utilized for thousands of years. Reading news articles about deforestation around different parts of the world in order to farm palm oil has also made me concerned about how my personal consumption could be contributing to the problem. I looked at the ingredient list of the soaps I already have at home and at the soaps I would naturally be inclined to purchase. About half of them are glycerin based (which isn’t a bad thing), but too many of them had palm oil as one of the primary ingredients.

All of this naturally led me to the conclusion that I should learn and make my own soap.

With the decision to never use palm oil in any of my recipes, regardless of whether or not the source claimed that their palm oil was “sustainable” and regardless of how beneficial the hard oil is to making an aesthetically pleasing bar of soap, I read blog post after blog post from renown soap making websites and perused through make-your-own soap books. I’ve taken enough chemistry classes both in high school and college to know the basics of saponification, but I’ve never had the opportunity to experiment with it.

On top of my decision to never use palm oils, I also decided early on to never add fragrances to any of my soap recipes. Soap is for cleaning and moisturizing. Fragrance can spell trouble in the cold process soap method and the amount needed to be noticed can set off reactions in those allergic and sensitive; it’s just not worth it. On top of the scented lotion bars I already make, I’m planning on creating a line of perfumed hand creams that people can enjoy layering on top of their clean skin after using their fragrance free soap.

Since beginning my soap making adventures at the end of last October, I’ve experimented with both hot and cold process methods. The hot process is beneficial in that it means the soap can be used as soon as it’s sufficiently hard because the lye has fully saponified the oils and has “cooked out,” but the downsides can be that the soap itself is ugly. Cold process soap is the more commonly used method because it can definitely create beautiful soap… if one cared to make it extravagantly beautiful. It feels almost sacrilege to sacrifice aesthetic, but seeing as soap is a consumable product, I don’t see the practicality of making overly complicated bars when I want my products to stand on the merit of their recipes and usefulness. Using all natural ingredients goes hand in hand with minimalist recipes, and that’s what I plan on going forward with my soaps. I don’t plan on adding anything that don’t serve a practical purpose.

I’ve just posted listings of two of my soaps on the shop and hope you enjoy them along with the others I will post in the future.