Why Our Handmade Soap?

Why should you use handmade soaps? Let's face it, these bars are more expensive than the soaps you can get in the grocery store and they are often more difficult to find and purchase. What is it about natural handmade soaps that makes them superior to the industrially manufactured soaps we're all so used to?

Well, let's take a look at those commercial soaps that are so readily available from the local grocery store. Just as an example, let's examine a "premium" type bar of commercial soap. This particular bar is touted as a "moisturizing body bar" that will "leave your skin feeling silky soft." So what's in this wonderful bar of soap? Here are the ingredients:

sodium cocoyl isethionate, stearic acid, sodium tallowate, water, sodium isethionate, coconut acid, sodium stearate, sodium dodecylbenzenesulfonate, sodium cocoate or sodium palm kernelate, fragrance, sodium chloride, mineral oil, sunflower seed oil, titanium dioxide, trisodium edta, trisodium etidronate, bht, d&c yellow no 11, d&c red no 17

So what is all this stuff??? Other than the water, mineral oil, and sunflower seed oil, most of us don't have any idea what these other ingredients are! Definitely a very "synthetic" sounding list of ingredients.

Now let's take a look at a bar of our handcrafted all-vegetable based soap. Let's look at a bar of Cocoa Swirl:

olive oil, coconut oil, distilled water, palm oil, canola oil, sodium hydroxide, cocoa butter, castor oil, cocoa powder, fragrance oil

I think we can all recognize most of the ingredients in this bar. Other than the sodium hydroxide and fragrance oil you could even eat any one of these ingredients! To me this is a much more "natural" list of ingredients. This handcrafted bar of soap relies on ingredients found in nature for its skin-care qualities, not upon laboratory-made chemicals that are synthetic imitations of the real things.

Each vegetable oil listed in the ingredients of the handcrafted soap bar has unique characteristics that they impart to the final product. One oil may offer a wonderfully rich lather, another may help to produce a harder bar of soap, while another lends super moisturizing characteristics. Carefully blending these oils together to produce a final product with very specific characteristics is what makes a superior bar of our handcrafted natural and special fragrance soaps.