Not so long ago, a sliver of soap made from the leftover drippings of a month of meals was a treasure. It was highly caustic, and in great demand. These lard bars were a blessing to those who lived during the 17th and 18th centuries, but they were crude in comparison to what we have available to us today.
SOAP AS A TELLTALE SIGN
German chemist Justus von Liebig claimed that much could be learned about a nation’s state of well-being by measuring its consumption of soap. The most civilized and wealthiest nations, he said, would be the ones consuming the largest quantities of soap per capita.
Our choices are many — maybe too many — and our work is cut out for us if we insist upon knowing exactly what we’re using on our skin. For years before I became a soapmaker, I was thrilled by a display of elegantly wrapped bars, one the color of avocados, another with the scent of fresh gardenias, all polished smooth as gems and arranged on the shelves like pieces of crystal. The classical music playing in the background was a sure sign of the soap’s purity. Today I’m not so easily wowed.
The stores are filled with all kinds of soaps. We may want liquid soap at the kitchen sink and solid bars in the bathtub. Many soaps are made with animal fats, and some are made with only vegetable oils. Most bars are manufactured industrially, while some are made in someone’s kitchen. Some of the unusual shapes we see are milled through expensive machinery. Some soaps are actually detergents. Occasionally, we can find a bar that was manufactured without any synthetic chemicals at all. Let’s take a closer look at the pros and cons of the soaps from which we can choose.
Liquid soaps offer convenience, cleanliness, and efficiency. They require very little effort to produce a lather, minimize person-to-person contact, and keep waste down.
Public restrooms usually offer liquid soap dispensers in place of bar soap to avoid messy counters, sloppy soap dishes, and the spread of germs. Surgeons use liquid soap with germicides for hospital scrubs, and many families place decorator dispensers by bathroom and kitchen sinks to keep things neat.
There is a price for this convenience, however. Many more chemicals are used to manufacture liquid soap than are necessary to manufacture a bar of hard soap. Certain synthetic chemicals are added to give the soap just the right consistency, so it doesn’t clog the dispenser. Others are used to assure enough of a lather for the average squirt of soap. Liquid soaps feel smooth, smell fresh, and minimize cleanup, but their chemical makeup should be considered carefully.
Hard bars often contain as many chemicals as liquid soap, but they don’t have to. This book is about hard soaps that are free of synthetic chemicals.
Soaps made with animal fat contain tallow or lard, while vegetable-based soaps are made with just vegetable oils. More tallow is used in soapmaking than any other fat, but today you can find soap made with almost any oil imaginable. Some of us have a strong preference for either animal or vegetable soaps; others never give it a thought.
Tallow comes from the solid fat around the kidneys and loins of cattle, sheep, and horses. Lard is the fat rendered from the tissue of pigs. Both have been used for centuries in soapmaking, though increased access to coconut, olive, palm, and other fine vegetable oils has led soapmakers to experiment with all sorts of combinations. One oil may offer a wonderful lather, but have a drying effect when used in excess. Another oil may work up a weak lather, but cure into a very hard bar of soap. Yet another oil may make a softer bar, but clean well.
Just one fat or oil on its own is not likely to serve your needs; a carefully calculated combination of fats and oils yields a superior bar of soap.
Whether you’re looking for tallow, olive oil, or babassu oil, with enough persistence you’ll find a supplier. You probably can find a meat processing plant within a drive of your home that will package the suet (see page 28) for you at no cost or a small per-pound price. Many fat and oil manufacturers or distributors carry pre-rendered tallow and lard in 50-pound buckets, saving the soapmaker the messy chore of rendering the suet into a usable liquid. This is more expensive, but quite a convenience. Rendering suet at home is a messy, time-consuming process.
Vegetable fats and oils may be more costly than tallow or lard, but their quality affords a superior skin-care product. And, purchasing vegetable oils in bulk 55-gallon drums, or even 50-pound buckets, makes them more affordable than the small decorator bottles of oil found at the supermarket. Oils that are commonly used in many industries, such as olive, are easier to find and less expensive to purchase than the more obscure oils.
Restaurant supply houses carry many of the edible oils in quantity. Bakeries and their suppliers used palm oil for years before health concerns about the oil’s highly saturated makeup caused them to cut back. Palm oil is now sold mostly by the tank-car to fat and oil companies that break it down into drums and pails and sell directly to soapmakers or distributors. Call your local Italian restaurants and ask who supplies their olive oil. Call Oriental restaurants about peanut oil. Coconut oil is used by businesses selling popcorn, but avoid the orange variety, which is discolored with beta-carotene. Also avoid the expensive little 12-ounce jars of coconut oil.
Soapmakers will quickly go through the 50-pound pails or boxes sold by edible oil manufacturers and their distributors. Some oils — like jojoba, sweet almond, and castor — are far more expensive to buy in small quantity than in bulk, but 32-ounce bottles and gallons are available if you cannot use drums. If you prefer vegetable soaps to tallow soaps, it’s worth taking the time to track down the desired oils in the quantities you can use. Even the more obscure varieties are available, one way or another. Keep calling around — you’ll have no problem finding a company to satisfy your particular soapmaking needs (see Suppliers listed in the appendices, page 157).
Much controversy surrounds the use of tallow (or its synthetic equivalents) in skin-care products, especially soap. Some argue that it has cleaned many generations of people without harm. Others point to tallow as just one of many impurities unknowingly slathered onto our faces. Some experts view it in perspective: For thousands of years tallow was a godsend, enabling less well-supplied generations to maintain certain sanitary levels. Now, however, we have healthier alternatives. Tallow is highly saturated and thought to clog pores, causing blackheads. It is also known to cause eczema in more sensitive individuals. Moreover, some people have ethical objections to tallow because it is not derived from live animals.
Our skin works as hard as the rest of our organs, continually ridding the body of impurities and absorbing light and moisture. Skin readily accepts a variety of water and oil-soluble materials through the pores. Since both the good and the bad enter readily, we must consider carefully which products to use. Our skin acts as a protective barrier, even repairing itself from injury, but each toxic exposure damages this barrier and inhibits the skin’s ability to function.
The general health of skin is related directly to its moisture content — how much water it’s able to retain. As healthy skin “cleans house” under normal conditions, it can retain moisture; but heat, cold, pollution, ultraviolet rays, synthetic cosmetics, and an over-processed, less nutritious diet push our skin past its limits. It just can’t keep up. If we don’t conserve our skin’s moisture content, the imbalance leads to dry skin and a less efficient system.
We need skin-care products that help the skin to balance its loss and absorption of moisture, while also nourishing the body with vitamins. Such products create a breathable barrier for the skin, attracting and allowing in a fresh supply of moisture while preventing the evaporation of internal moisture.
Tallow and lard can clog up the skin’s breathing system. In contrast, a thin layer of certain vegetable oils will keep internal moisture from evaporating too quickly, while still allowing the skin to release waste and absorb a fresh supply of external moisture. Choose oils for soapmaking with an understanding of this function in mind. Some emollient oils that absorb moisture well are olive oil, castor oil, avocado oil, jojoba oil, and sweet almond oil.
A SOAPMAKER’S STORY
Sandie Ledray and Mary McIsaac/Brookside Soap Company
The women of Brookside Soap Company, Sandie Ledray and Mary McIsaac, create herbal body-care products which “maximize and celebrate the power and richness of the plant kingdom, without exploiting people or the environment.” Toward this goal, Brookside products contain no colorants, no synthetic ingredients, and nothing of animal origin. Their packaging is minimal and recyclable. The ink used on their soap wrappers is soy-based, and the glue to seal them is vegetable-based. The herbs used in their products are organically grown. The combinations range from Rosemary & Lavender Soap, with apricot kernel oil and chamomile flowers for all skin types, to Avocado and Calendula Soap with shea butter, oils of avocado, calendula, and apricot kernel, marshmallow root, and the essential oils of ylang-ylang, clove, and sage for normal to dry skin, and Cinnamon Hand Scrub with ground corn and cinnamon for gardeners, cooks, potters, and painters.
“Soapmaking found its way into my life rather by accident,” says Sandie. When she ran out of funds while renovating her house, Sandie turned to her own resourcefulness, and began gardening, fishing — and making her own soap. Her very first batch turned out beautifully, and before long she was receiving visitors with empty buckets and dirty clothes. “As friends would walk out my door carrying a bucket of laundry soap, they would often suggest that I consider selling my great soap,” says Sandie. It got to the point where she would have no peace until she began to heed her friends’ requests. “My laundry soap turned into a bath bar soap,” says Sandie, “which turned into an all-vegetable bath bar soap, which eventually turned into an organic, herbal bath bar soap line.”
Sandie didn’t have any soapmaker friends to help her perfect her product. “The high quality of our soap comes from years of trial and lots of error,” says Sandie. “I have a record of every batch of soap that I have ever made, including its success or failure. Failure is good — you learn a tremendous amount about the materials and the chemistry from the failures!”
Today, Brookside Soaps are produced in 4,500 square feet of manufacturing space in a small business park in Seattle, Washington. They make 450-pound batches of cold-process soap, which is wire-cut by hand, and produce 28 different bar soaps, including eight Brookside Soaps and many private labels.
All-vegetable soaps are not as scarce as they used to be, but tallow-based and synthetically manufactured soaps are still the norm. Because the cost of fine-quality vegetable oils is higher than that of tallow, most soapmaking companies find all-vegetable bars prohibitively expensive to produce. Tallow is relatively inexpensive and less temperamental during the soapmaking process, so it is the fat of choice for many soap manufacturers. However, as demand grows for soaps with fewer chemicals, no animal products, and skin-friendly vegetable oils, some companies are trying vegetable soaps and discovering that the manufacturing process is quite workable.
Still, tallow soaps and soaps made with synthetics comprise most of the products found in drugstores, supermarkets, and boutiques. To find all-vegetable soaps look for health food stores, mail-order businesses, and herbal gift shops. A pure vegetable-soap bar is usually more costly, though many tallow and synthetic soaps with fancy packaging carry similar price tags. When you buy soap, be sure that you are paying mostly for soap ingredients, not for packaging and presentation.
Many factors determine a soap’s ability to lather and to remain firm throughout use. These qualities are related directly to which oils or fats were used in the soapmaking process. The more saturated a fat, the less soluble its soap will be in water, which also means that its lather will be weak, though longer lasting. Beef tallow and pork lard produce bars with weak lathers, while coconut oil, with its high proportion of lauric acid, offers a full lather, even in seawater. Olive, peanut, and soybean oils lather somewhat, but produce a superior lather only in combination with coconut oil. Companies producing tallow-based soaps usually add 20 percent coconut oil to achieve a satisfactory lather.
It is often claimed that tallow yields a much harder soap than a vegetable oil could and that harder soaps are longer-lasting and more economical. Tallow does make a very firm product, but vegetable oils can do the same. The combination of oils is key to making a hard vegetable soap. The right proportions of selected oils can produce a very hard bar — one that does not melt in the soap dish and lasts as long as a tallow soap. A variety of vegetable oils, combined with carefully calculated percentages of coconut and palm oils, produces a desirable texture and a long-lasting soap.
Again, keep in mind that industrially prepared soap is very different from cold-process soaps made by hand, without synthetics. The industrial soaps often rely upon synthetics to achieve physical characteristics like lather and texture. Most cold-processed soapmakers depend only upon oils and soap-making techniques to achieve a desired result.
Both tallow soaps and vegetable-based soaps can be scented with pure essential oils and fragrance oils. The scent is more stable in vegetable-based soaps, however, because the natural odor of vegetable oils is less overpowering than the natural odor of tallow and lard. While vegetable oils are either odorless or very mild, animal fats may smell fatty and somewhat like their meat. In soap form, the vegetable oils remain odorless or mildly complementary of the pure essential or fragrance oils used, while the tallow or lard soaps may smell increasingly fatty, and overpower the pure essential or fragrance oils.
No one oil or fat is the clear-cut first choice for soapmaking. Each one has its own set of characteristics that contributes positively and negatively to the soap made from it. Animal-based soaps are not always inferior, and vegetable-based soaps are not always better. The most cooperative oil or fat must be selected for each characteristic desired in a soap. It is a combination of oils and fats that will yield the bar which satisfies the most needs. My preference for vegetable soaps is partly a personal philosophical choice.
Though many areas of the cosmetic industry are bound by ingredient disclosure laws, an exception permits soap manufacturers to reveal only what they choose to reveal about their soaps. This makes it very difficult for consumers to know what they’re using on their skin. Cottage industry and home manufacturing operations hardly have a monopoly on safe, effective skin-care products; larger companies often employ chemists and quality-control people to continually monitor their products for purity. However, “big business” historically has been pressured by the need to surpass the last quarter’s profits, which often leads to compromising a soap’s purity to achieve an impressive balance sheet. Though some companies offer superior products, we unfortunately cannot count on the large soap-producing industry to provide the purity and the quality we think we’re purchasing.
Cottage industry affords consumers the opportunity to speak directly with the soapmaker, allowing for a more personal exchange, and, perhaps, a more reliable assessment of the integrity of their product. However, even this route leaves room for doubt. The only way to be sure of what goes into your soap is to make it yourself.
Homemade soap has no limits other than the energy and the imagination of the soapmaker. When you make your own soap you can use only the oils and the special ingredients individually suited to your skin-care needs. You don’t have to wonder what has been added, skimped on, or left out, because you’ve seen for yourself what’s gone into it.
Milled soaps are made by machines that press freshly made soap between sets of rollers to flatten it paper thin and prepare it to be shredded. Once shredded, the soap flakes are ground through the rollers again and again, squeezing and mixing them together. The mixture then goes through extrusion machinery, that squeezes out a long bar of tightly compacted soap flakes, and cuts it into smaller bars. The flakes are no longer distinguishable within these dense bars of milled soap. The continuous compression creates a very hard soap and a polished appearance, while the very thin flakes increase the soap’s lathering quality.
These soaps are truly beautiful, but we, as consumers, must remember to focus on content. Milled soaps rarely are made without tallow and many synthetic chemicals. A cold-processed vegetable soap with lots of unsaturated olive oil, no additives, and an excess of glycerin would stick to the rollers and extrude poorly. The milling industry typically adds a variety of synthetic chemicals to transform soap from its more natural state, and give it enough plasticity to withstand the milling process.
SHARING THE SECRETS OF SOAPMAKING
The only way to advance soapmaking research is for the soapmaker and the chemist to combine efforts, but we’re as secretive today as people were in the 1700s, when they had even less information to share. In 1769, the Academy of Marseilles offered a prize for the research paper revealing the best method for making soap. There were no responses for five years. Finally, a man who later admitted to knowing nothing about soapmaking submitted a paper describing a particular method. It turned out he had acquired the information confidentially from a soapmaker friend.
Hand-cut bars are not always cold-process soaps made without additives, but they often are. Cottage industries usually make soap simply, with only fats, oils, sodium hydroxide, natural emollients, water, and essential oils. With the cold-process method, soap retains the natural glycerin created during the saponification process, and no chemicals are used to alter the natural reactions. With nothing added and nothing taken away, the final product is soap and not a laboratory imitation. Hand-cut bars are never perfectly squared or rounded; they appear rather crude when compared to a perfectly symmetrical, beautifully polished bar of milled soap. They also are far more prone to having excess fat or lye, since the cold-process method does not allow for adjustments once the reaction is underway. But with careful calculations and by measuring ahead of time, you can avoid extreme excess. So hand-cut bars are properly recognized as more likely to be untainted and pure than polished, milled bars.
Soap in its various forms has been used for thousands of years. From the soapy residue of certain herbs, to the potash soaps of yesteryear, to the more refined toilet soaps of today, the limitations of all forms have always been understood and accepted. Only when faced with shortages of fats and oils during World War I did people feel compelled to look for a replacement for soap. This led to the invention of synthetic detergents, but it seems to have led us down the path of no return.
Today we casually toss a cup of soap powder in with our clothing and watch it work miracles. A squirt of blue liquid detergent ahead of time almost ensures a clean-as-new blouse, and a sheet of chemicals tossed into the dryer leaves our clothes soft and floral-scented. Harsh chemicals clean, scent, and coat our clothes. What we may not understand is that many of these synthetic detergents also find their way into our skin-care products.
Soap cleans well in warm, soft, alkaline water, but its effectiveness decreases as water conditions change. When soap reacts with the calcium and magnesium ions found in hard water, it forms an insoluble salt that leaves a residue — a floating curd, or that ring around the bathtub. This compound won’t dissolve and is thrown out of the solution, adding to the dirt.
Detergents are more versatile than soap. Though detergents are used most commonly to clean dishes and wash hair, they are also used in combination with soap to make toilet bars, also known as syndet bars. Detergent additives, called lime-soap dispersants, ensure solubility in all kinds of water. You’ll find these additives, listed under a variety of chemical names, on the labels of the most familiar bars of soap on the store shelves.
Although a detergent is loosely defined as any cleansing substance — which would clearly include soap — it more commonly refers to a synthetically derived cleansing product. Detergents are designed to work in the very worst of conditions, and they often do. Once again, however, we pay an unquantifiable price for products that indiscriminately strip clean. Only very harsh, synthetic chemicals clean all materials in all media, and most of our cleaning needs are not so extreme. Perhaps we need to scale down, from overkill to moderation.
Perhaps no word has been more overused and more loosely defined than the word “natural.” I define it narrowly, a chemist defines it broadly, and most of us have seen so much of it that we’re ready to eliminate it.
It is not accurate to define a natural product as one without chemicals — everything on this earth is a chemical. Sometimes it is defined as “organic,” but that word is also in the eyes of the beholder. The same is true of the phrase, “no animal products.” Some people will not use beeswax because they view it as an animal by-product. (See veganism in Glossary, on page 171.)
I define a natural soap as one which relies only upon ingredients found in nature for its skin-care qualities. I define a synthetic soap as one which relies upon laboratory-made chemicals to make the soap look and feel and act a certain way. All soap has chemical ingredients, but we can think of natural soaps as those made according to natural law, and synthetic soaps as manmade cleaners — synthetic imitations of the real thing.
It’s tempting for soap manufacturers to lean toward synthetics and away from natural materials. Synthetics are more stable in more situations. Therefore, they are less expensive in the long run, and — unlike fats and oils which differ slightly from tree to tree, season to season, and region to region — they are the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow. A gram of this chemical, a mole of that one, and voilà — a perfect copy.
As we become more and more comfortable with synthetics in all areas of our lives, we run the risk of losing natural defenses and continually needing greater synthetic intervention. Skin care is but one facet of this phenomenon. Our skin is remarkably capable of functioning on its own to protect us, but, as we use more and more harsh, foreign substances, we alter the body’s chemical makeup and leave our skin without its natural defenses. We risk becoming dependent on stronger and stronger synthetics to take the place of the body’s natural systems. We must each, as individuals, decide which route to go — the way of nature, or the way of the lab.
