So I hear you ask, whats the difference between the soap you can buy cheaply on the supermarket shelves and the soap you make?

Soap that is made commercially is super hard and drying. Although made in the same way as the soap you can make yourself, the after treatment of it is severe.  Natural soap, has qualities that can’t be duplicated and added after extraction.  When we make soap, we start with acids (fats and oils) and mix with alkalai (Lye) to set off a chemical reaction.  Once this reaction has taken place and the correct amount of time has passed, we have a moiturising, nourishing and cleansing bar of soap.  Nothing further should be done to it, BUT in the commercially prepared bars you have on the supermarket shelves you will find a few other ingredients and none of the original moisturising qualities.

In the commercial processes, the finished soap is shaved and sprayed with alcohols and pressed. This extracts the naturally occuring glycerine within the product.  This process will be repeated until all the glycerine is extracted.  Glycerine is a natural humectant (moisturiser) and you will now find this product on the shelves in the health section of the supermarket.  Industry has developed a way of making  “two for the price of one” products from soap making! (One has to wonder if their first aim wasn’t the Glycerine, and the by-product, a synthetic soap.)

After extracting the glycerine from the soap, it is now lifeless, hard, and half the product it was, so they fill it up with synthetic fillers.  This product also will not bubble like we expect soap to do, so then more synthetics are added. We know these as Detergents. We use detergents every day around our homes for washing, washing up, and for stripping the greasy film off our bathtubs and floors.  We even use it on our hair. Added to these detergents then, are synthetic fragrances. These are cheap as well, and for the multi-million dollar industry, it’s a boon for people that love their skin to smell of roses or musk, or some other fragrance. This is how they sell millions of dollars worth of the stuff every year.

So what about those soaps advertised to have added moisturisers?  Turning a bottle of moisturiser over and reading the ingredients will give you some idea of their contents.  The listed contents of all products should be in the order of the most ingredient to the least amount of ingredient.  Note that the foremost ingredient will always be Aqua, or we know this as water   A thin viscous daycream is almost 70% WATER.  Night creams have less of this and more oils.  Soaps that regard their composition of including moisturiser, do not lather like we think they should, and also do not last as well as those hard synthetic bars. So you have to ask yourself, why add it in the first place?  Why not just make a natural bar of soap without fillers, synthetics, artificial scents, colourants, synthetic detergents, and added moisturisers that don’t work anyway?

If you make a bar of soap, you will be retaining the moisturisers within the composition, have a mild bar of soap, that does exactly what its supposed to do, and if you scent it with essential oils, have a lovely smell associated with the REAL item that it’s extracted from.  If you buy a syndet bar (we know them as “synthetic detergents” hence the word syndet) then perhaps your trip to the dr for the dry skin and eczema/dermatitis that you may have or develop, might cost you more than a REAL bar of soap in the first place.   When we buy soap, we have to remember… that old saying of “you get what you pay for” aptly applies here.

Happy Soaping everyone!