Handmade Artisan Soap: What and Why
A few years ago, my wife started what turned out to be one of the first and very best soap blogs around, The Soap Bar. She made scrubs and body products by hand at the time, not soaps, but she loved and was fascinated by them.
So as part of The Soap Bar project, she started reviewing what she called handmade artisan soaps, a term I was unfamiliar with. I mean for me, soap was soap, right? You go to the market, buy a four-pack of what's on sale, then use it to remove dirt. The stuff she was talking about was pretty, sure, but that's about the only difference, right? Well, not so much as it turned out.
There's a fundamental difference between the majority of what you buy at most stores and what I've come to call "real" soap. For the most part, the stuff in stores is pressed detergent. It's loaded with chemicals with names like sodium lauryl sulfate and lauryl sulfoacetate.
Worse, there's often some excess alkali in the soap (not great for your skin), and the naturally occurring glycerin (which actually is good for your skin) is removed entirely for sale separately.
Real soap, on the other hand, the handmade artisan stuff, is made using traditional methods. For example, in what's called the "cold process" method, a group of oils like olive, coconut, palm, sunflower, almond, and others are blended together in proportions the soaper likes to work with, and then a very specific mixture of lye and water is added. The lye reacts with the oils, turning what starts out liquid into blocks of soap, and neutralizing the lye, in a process called saponification.
The already-turning-into-soap vat of oils and lye is immediately poured into molds and the soaper then performs any additional treatments to it (like adding other soaps, teasing the top into a pattern, pouring a second soap into it to form a swirl, or even adding dried flowers to it before it hardens.
Continued on the next page
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