Here are the top 5 reasons to use handmade soap:
1. Handmade soap is real soap.
Unlike the “bath and beauty” bars in grocery and department stores, handmade soap is real soap. It contains only fats and oils that have gone through an organic bio-chemical process to make deep-cleaning natural glycerin. The process is called “saponification”. The resulting soap is a natural cleaner that does not rely on artificial chemical detergents.
If you read the ingredients on a major bath and beauty bar soap wannabe product, you will find an average of 22 ingredients. Most of these are chemicals made up of 4 and 5 syllable words. Homemade soap has 3 basic ingredients: oils, water, and lye. And the lye disappears during the soap making process so that is not even a final ingredient.
2. Homemade soap uses custom ingredients.
You control the ingredients that go into your own handmade soap, so you always know what you are getting. It is up to you to decide if you want to use animal fats or vegetable oils. Choose from exotic butters and natural vitamin extracts. Add in essential oils or even use beer or wine as your lye solution base instead of water. You stay in full control of the product from start to finish.
3. The world will thank you.
There are no residual environmental toxins produced from homemade soap. No rainforests are plowed under. No people are used as cheap sweatshop labor.
By buying handmade soap, or making your own, you can ensure that only environmentally responsible practices are used in the harvesting of oils. Far mor importantly, you can choose to work with brands that practice fair trade.
4. Homemade soap can save you money.
If you make your own soap, you can typically do so for about half to two-thirds the cost of buying big brand beauty bars.
Before I started buying my ingredients in bulk, I never spent more than $1.35 per bar when making my own soap from top-brand organic and all-natural oils. Now that I buy those same high-quality supplies in bulk, I spend an average of $0.74 each, for those same bars.
For about a year I bought my supplies during local trips to BJ’s. This is while I was starting my business and not yet ready for large volume purchases. My cost per bar when buying from a big box discount membership store averaged about $0.95 per bar.
5. There is no active lye in handmade soap when properly made.
This one surprises people but it’s true. There is no active lye in handmade soap when properly made.
“Soap”, as defined by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, is made up of the saponified oils resulting from a natural reaction of lye and water converting oils to soap. The lye gets used up in the process as a fuel source.
In other words, even though lye is used to make the soap, it is consumed and not present in the final soap product.
My husband likens it to cooking burgers on our charcoal grill. As he puts it, the fats are converted into tasty burger and the charcoal is merely the fuel that also happens to leave that delicious “char”. I know it is not the same thing, but it’s close enough and makes sense in its own way.
What do you think?
Do you have other reasons why we should use handmade soap – or maybe a contrary opinion? I would love to hear from you. Just place your comments in the form at right and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.
What’s Next?
If you would like to give soap making a try, you might enjoy our post from a couple weeks ago – 11 Things Every Soap Maker Needs to Know.