Soaping Process

Good natural soap, the kind we make here, starts with just three basic ingredients, water, oil and lye.  Then we add more  ingredients for the properties they impart to the soap and our skin, such as herbs, minerals and essential oils.

Now you may be thinking...Oil? How am I supposed to *clean* my hands with oil, Ida? Good question! Let me explain. When Lye is mixed with water and oil, it goes through a chemical process called saponification.  Saponification is the Hydration reaction where free hydroxide breaks the ester bonds between the fatty acids and glycerol of a triglyceride, resulting in free fatty acids and glycerol.  This is why natural soaps have naturally occurring glycerin in them.  Each oil has it's own Saponification Value or SAP Value for short. This is the ratio of oil to lye to reliably create the reaction. 

Thanks to saponification, we can get creative!  Different oils impart different properties to soap.  It's measured in multiple ways such as hardness, conditioning,  bubbly, creamy and lather to name a few. Using skin loving oils like olive oil and rice bran oil creates a conditioning bar, while a semi-hard oil like coconut oil is added for it's cleansing and hardening properties.  We fine tune our formulae to create bars for particular purposes. Some are simply nourishing while others are exfoliants and still some are great for resolving skin conditions.  The combinations are seemingly endless

Cutting, Curing and Drying

After we've made one of our soaps, we let it set overnight and tend it with heat or air depending on the temperature.  Within a day or two, we are usually ready to unmold and cut our soaps to begin the curing and drying process.  Most of our soap cures for a minimum of 2 moths and other soaps, like our Castile Soaps, cure for 6 months or more. During the cure time, we regularly rotate each bar to help them dry evenly. 

    

Essential Oils and Natural Botanicals 

Life would be pretty boring if we only offered one "flavor."  I mean vanilla ice cream for ever?!  No offense vanilla lovers.  Rather, we think of a myriad of oil and herb combinations to help folks LOVE showers or washing their hands. For this reason, we add only pure essential oils to our products.  Our essential oils have been distilled, sometimes multiple times to deepen the scent.  Essential oils are fragile, they do not last as long as lab created fragrances.  However, our oils actually have a multitude of beneficial properties that lab fragrances do not.  You may chose your soap solely on how it smells and that is ok! We do the research making sure it's also a beneficial blend and share some of the benefits with you on each product page.

You might now also be thinking, wait, I've seen color in your soaps.  You're right.  Instead of lab colorants, we use herbs, minerals and clays to add to the soap adventure. Sure, who doesn't like colors like apple red and fuchsia?  But we'd rather see them in nature then with a item number after them in our ingredient list.  So we find natural ways to add personality to our soap products.