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A conversation at a recent craft show made
me do a little thinking, and hopefully I can do a little educating here.
A woman was talking to me about her dry,
sensitive skin and the problems she has. I asked her "If I give you a bar of the Bare Naked, would you
be willing to give it a try?"
"Probably
not," she answered. "All I can use is Ivory soap."
After she left, another woman who
happened to be standing there during the conversation said "Wow, she must not realize how much she could benefit from
handmade soap." An obvious handmade soap fan...I could have hugged her!!
So, I decided to do a
little more research about the sensitive skin products on the market. First I looked at the ingredients in that famous
bar of soap and came up with this:
Sodium tallowate, sodium cocoate or sodium palm kernelate, water, sodium chloride, sodium silicate, magnesium
sulfate, and fragrance.
So what are those things?
When
you mix lye with tallow (cow fat), it becomes Sodium Tallowate. Sodium Cocoate is lye and coconut oil, Sodium Palm Kernelate
is lye and palm kernel oil, etc. Sodium Chloride is simple table salt. But,
what about...
Sodium Silicate
Magnesium Sulfate
How about another famous "1/4
moisturizing cream" bar ingredients:
Fragrance/perfume
Stearic acid
Tetrasodium EDTA
2,6-Di-t-butyl-p-cresol (BHT)
Sodium stearate
Trisodium etidronate
Sodium chloride
Water
Sodium tallowate
Titanium dioxide
Sodium dodecylbenzenesulfonate
Coconut
fatty acids
Sodium cocoate
Sodium cocoyl isethionate
cocoamidopropylbetaine
Sodium palm kernelate
Sodium
alkybenzenesulfonate
Here's a link where you can go and see what that stuff is:
1/4 moisturizing cream soap bar
My whole point is that you don't need all
that stuff to make a good bar of soap. And some of it is just plain not in YOUR best interest. If I've
piqued your interest, grab your bottle of body wash or bar of commercial soap, and do your own research on the ingredients.
To get you started, jump to our "Interesting Links" page.
Interesting Links
Then remember what we DON'T put in our soaps!!
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