Our Products
All of our products are handmade, one batch at a time. We use only pure vegetable oils, distilled water, and all-natural botanicals—many of which come from our very own garden.
One key difference between natural, hand-made soaps and commercial soaps is what is put in, what is left out, and what is extracted. Commercial soaps typically have their glycerin extracted and detergents and foaming agents added. The glycerin is sold to the lotion companies, and since the detergents dry your skin and have no glycerin to compensate and moisturize, you'll need to buy lotion to repair the damage. They also add anti-bacterial agents, when all they needed to do—according to recent hand-washing studies—was convince us to scrub our hands for at least fifteen seconds. (OK, this can be difficult with small kids, but you are keeping after them, right?)
Our specialty (and first love) is our big beefy bath-bars. Made from pure olive oil and other vegetable oils, we're sure you'll find these to be just about the best bar soaps around.
Soaps
Our soaps are made from pure vegetable oils specially selected for just the right effect: a wonderful bar of soap, a rich shower gel, lovely liquid hand-soap, luxurious shampoo. The main ingredient in our soap is pure olive oil. It is gentle and moisturizing to your skin. Along with olive oil, we add soybean oil for its moisturizing properties. And what would a bar of soap be without wonderful lather? We add coconut and palm oils to provide just that. In bar soap, these oils have the added benefit of making the soap harder and more resilliant so they last longer.
Bar Soaps
For our bar soaps, we use the old-fashioned cold process method to turn these specially selected oils into our handmade soap. We do this with lye ("No lye, no soap!") and pure, distilled water. Our soap is "superfatted" to increase the moisturizing power, and to ensure that no lye remains. We add different fragrance- and essential oils to create yummy smelling bars. In some bars we also add botanicals such as crushed rose petals or poppy seed, or exfoliants, like ground oatmeal.
If you'd like to see what is currently available (or will be available soon), go take a look at what's on our curing rack.
Liquid Soaps
Everyone needs soap. Sometimes, a bar just isn't convenient. The manufacturers of commercial liquid soap have capitalized on this.
For our liquid soaps (hand soap, shower gels, shampoos, and the like) we use potash in place of the lye to convert the oils into soap ("saponification") and use the hot process method rather than cold. This makes the final soap a liquid and transparent, rather than rather than solid and opaque. We've taken our favorite fragrances and applied them to liquid hand soaps, but leave out the botanicals.