Our Ingredients
Our promise is that each bar is made without preservatives, synthetics, or parabens. Our soaps are formulated with a blend of premium oils to naturally nourish your skin. We use high quality oils that produce a silky lather to help hydrate your skin. We focus on using essential oils in all of our handmade bars, not synthetic fragrances to scent our bars. In our triple milled bars, we use goats milk to create a nourishing bar for the skin and our Jubilee Jam is the only bar to use naturally derived fragrances rather than essential oils.
Base Soap Oils:
We use only vegan oils to craft a hardy yet moisturizing bar. Each type of oil has a different role within the soap making process.
We source our palm oil from an active Member of RSPO (Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil). While some soapmakers have decided to exclude palm from their soap due to the controversy around the deforestation and its dramatic impact on threatened and endangered local species, we have consciously decided to continue using palm. Despite the negativity around palm, many natives in Indonesia and Malaysia depend on the resource as a means of generating a living. We continue to monitor our suppliers to ensure that our palm is being sourced responsibly.
Coconut oil comes from the kernel of mature coconuts. The oil provides for a hardy and very cleansing bar while also producing an incredibly bubbly lather. However, too much coconut would create an overly drying product.
Palm oil (sustainably sourced) is processed from the flesh of the fruit of tropical oil palm plants. Often dubbed as “veggie tallow”, palm contributes to soap hardness, a stable lather, and a silky feel. It is a primary reason why our soaps can maintain their firmness while being held in the palm of your hands compared to castile soaps (made of 100% olive oil), which tend to melt upon holding.
Sunflower oil is created by pressing the oils from the seeds of a sunflower. It is rich in essential fatty acids and vitamin E which helps produce an incredibly rich and conditioning lather for the skin. We balance the amount of sunflower oil with others because it helps harden the bar though has a slower-absorption rate meaning that it can feel a bit oily on the skin if used alone.
Safflower Oil is typically cold pressed or expeller pressed from the seeds of a thistle like plant which thrives in dry climates. The plant is actually from the same family as the sunflower. It is a great oil for soap making because it is highly conditioning and moisturizing. It's got a medium lather, which is why we mix it with other oils that produce a higher lather.
Rosemary Extract is a great natural antioxidant that can be used as a preservative in soap making to prevent oxidation of our natural oils. In small amounts, it does not add the final product scent. Furthermore, rosemary extract has been shown to demonstrate anti-inflammatory and antimicrobial characteristics.
Colorants:
Activated Charcoal is a natural ingredient that serves a dual purpose in soapmaking. First, it can color the soap anywhere from a dull grey to a rich midnight black. Second, it has an ability to absorb and raw out oil from the skin, making it a particularly great facial bar for those prone to oily skin or acne. Our Starry Night and Black Tie Affair bars are colored with activated charcoal.
Alkanet & Comfrey Roots pair well in soap making and are typically used for producing a natural blue or purple color in the soap. Aklanet in general is great for achieving various shades of purple. Our Wisteria Lane bar is achieves its purple color through these two root powders.
Chlorophyll is a common natural ingredient to turn soap into a rich green color. It is rich in antioxidants and has anti-microbial and anti-inflammatory properties. However, it may fade into a pale yellowish color over time (ie +6-8 months). Our Great Thymes bar is colored with Chlorophyll.
Scents:
All of our bars but one (Jubilee Jam) are made with 100% essential oils. Essential oils are extracted from different parts of a plant, such as flowers, herbs, or roots. These oils are pure extractions that are obtained through the process of steam distillation or solve extractions and are not cut with a type of carrier oil. Sometimes, depending on the type of plant, the extraction may prove to be very complex. These 100% pure oils are "neat", meaning they have not been processed, diluted or manipulated in any way with solvents or other additives. Essential oils are difficult to reproduce synthetically since they can be made up of 50-500 different naturally occurring chemicals found in the plant and not all of them have been identified.
When we started in 2013, we committed to using only essential oils. We only began looking into natural fragrances after receiving high volume customer requests to create a unique, delicious berry scent that could not be found through essential oils. Jubilee Jam is one of our most popular bars, but we are still very careful and slow in how we choose to expand our new scents through natural fragrances.
You can learn more about the differences between essential oils vs fragrances here.