It seems so simple; you go to the store, stroll down the soap aisle and decide to make a purchase. You have so many choices, bar soap, liquid soap, body soap, face soap and so on. What few realize is you are purchasing a synthetic detergent disguised as soap. Commercial soap manufacturing is a blend of chemicals that are detergents, but handmade soap has glycerin which is a huge benefit to your skin.
Glycerin occurs when vegetable oils or animal fats are saponified during cold process soap making, but commercial companies extract glycerin to use in other products. Glycerin is a humectant which means it draws moisture from the air and into your skin. You want this in your soap! Unlike handmade soap, commercial soap can be very harmful and drying to your skin. Handmade cold process soaps on the other hand are beneficial to your skin leaving it soft and moisturized. Handmade soaps are also rich in antioxidants, vitamins and nutrients that are essential to maintaining healthy skin.
Soap has been around since about 3000 BC, early settlers made soap from processed animal fat. To saponify soap you need to mix the oils or fats with lye. Wait, lye, that sounds scary? Lye has been made forever by filtering water through ashes. Modern lye is known as sodium hydroxide and is available in a food grade. When cold process bar soap is hand made all the lye is reacted with the oils, in fact more oils are added than can be saponified, this offers a margin of safety but also offers un-saponified oils for your skin. These un-saponified oils are called super fat. The super fat percentage in cold process soap typically is 3 to 5%.
There are numerous small companies making and selling handmade cold process soap, with all these companies you can certainly find one that will make getting clean a wonderful experience and will be a healthy choice that your skin will benefit from.
