Technical but True

Did you know that ALL soap is lye soap? Not only that, but much of it contains a ton of plain old lard. Go get a bar of the soap you use now and read the ingredient list. It might scare you just a little. I’m going to go a bit technical on you now, but please keep reading, and then do some research of your own.

Soap is basically foaming salt that is formed by mixing fat and or oil with an alkali, lye. Lye has many pseudonyms: caustic soda, sodium hydroxide or soda lye, potassium hydroxide or potash lye.

Most liquid soaps are made with potassium hydroxide while most bar soaps are produced with sodium hydroxide, but none the less, lye it is. Lye is usually described on your soap label as sodium tallowate. Sodium tallowate is a naturally occurring result of combining sodium hydroxide (lye) with beef fat, and it is VERY common in commercially available soap. That means when you use a bar of soap containing sodium tallowate, you are washing your face with beef fat and other hard to pronounce elements.

I found a bar of "Irish Spring Original" in my cabinet. Here’s the run down:
"Sodium tallowate, sodium cocoate, and or sodium Palm Kernelate, water, Hydrogenated Tallow acid, Coconut Acid, Glycerin, Fragrance, Sodium Chloride, Pentasodium Pentetate, Pentaerythrityl Tetra-di-t-butyl Hydroxyhydrocinnamate, Titanium Dioxide, D&C Green No. 8, FD&C Green No. 3."

My eyes crossed just trying to read it all. Literally. I had to take a break and look at something else for a minute before I could continue typing it here.

Sodium tallowate is lye and beef fat, but what about Sodium cocoate?
It is lye and coconut oil, which is a better, but who wants Pentaerythrityl Tetra-di-t-butyl Hydroxyhydrocinnamate on their face? It has been flagged as a suspected persistent, bioaccumulative toxicant by the European Chemicals Bureau PBT working group. And Titanium Dioxide? Look it up.

So for the most part, when you are using a commercial soap, you are washing with lard and irritating chemicals. I decided against doing that10 years ago.

The lack of chemicals and being able to use vegetable oils instead of animal fat are the reasons I started making my own soap— and it sounded kind of revolutionary and off the beaten track.

WOW—how did that happen, this dependence on the huge industrial monster for all our needs? But that’s another whole blog isn’t it?

Here’s the list of ingredients in the batch I made today, and my house smells so nice right now!!

I started with LYE and water—now you know it’s the only thing that makes soap—and I’ll go into what happens to completely neutralize it in a later post (hint: it's a chemical reaction called saponification.)

Then I added soybean oil, coconut oil, palm kernel oil, sunflower oil, olive oil, and castor oil. (Nothing against all the cows we have grazing on our place—but not a pinch of tallow in sight.)

To finish it all off, I tossed in some French Green Clay, Calendula petals and a fragrance oil called “Waterfall.” I’ll have to wait six weeks for that chemical reaction to fully take place. It’s what we called “curing” the soap, but it is well worth the time and trouble.