Ingredients - Whats inside?

We offer a nice simple product range, we make soaps, salts, bath bombs, lip balms, handcreams and candles etc.

These products are made from familiar ingredients like vegetable oils & fats (Coconut oil, Olive oil, Cocoa butter and Shea butter), Beeswax, Soy bean wax, Fragrant and Essential oils, Micas, Ultramarine Pigments, Flowers and Petals. Exfoliants like ground Pumice stones, Poppy seeds and Oatmeal, and other baking ingredients like Bicarbonate of soda and Citric acid.

An ingredient you may not be so familiar with is Lye: (Sodium/Potassium- Hydroxide.) To make soap, we require an alkali to react with our fats and oils to saponify them. All ‘real’ soap is made this way using sodium hydroxide, (or Potassium Hydroxide for liquid soap.) Products made without lye are surfactant based and aren’t sold as true “Soap” because, well they’re not, (they are detergents and are usually labelled ‘hand wash’ etc.) Many people find these products smell amazing, lather well, but just dry their skin right out.

Lye is now made in laboratories, but the old fashioned way is really interesting.

In the old days, to make lye (Potassium Hydroxide), people would burn hardwood in a nice hot fire to create ashes as white as they could. The ashes would be collected and mixed with water, left over night, strained, then the liquid evaporated away until all that was left was a powder. This powder (KOH) is the alkali that was used to make soap for generations. Lye sounds like a scary ingredient to use in a natural product, it is caustic, and if it touches your skin it will burn you (Or rather, it will try to turn your fat into soap! remember fight club?) But without it , soap simply doesn’t exist. Here comes the cool bit:

Superfatting!

Every individual oil or fat has ‘SAP value’, all this means is that any given oil requires a certain amount of lye to turn it into soap. In the old days there was no doubt a fair amount of guesstimating involved (and slightly burny soap), but these days, because of the soapers that paved our way, we know exactly how much hydroxide is needed to turn each oil or fat into soap.

Superfatting means that we put in less hydroxide than we need to turn our oils to soap, and the result is that the lye used in our recipes is completely used up, dissipated and gone, leaving a substantial amount of skin loving oils left ‘raw in the bar’.

Our soap bars contain a superfat excess of 6% spread between Coconut Oil, Cocoa Butter, Olive Oil and Shea butter. Try our soap, allow the oils to absorb into your skin, give it a week or so and see how you feel. Our base recipe has only had 4 major tweaks in 10 years, our latest tweak eliminated palm oil, prior to that our focus was on moisturising and hardness. There will always be room for improvement, but honestly,  I don’t know that we will be able to improve our current recipe. It’s good.