April 28th Vesta will be at the Durham Craft Market!

Hello Nanette!
The process of making soap will always include the use of lye to saponify oils into soap. Even glycerin is a byproduct taken from the commercial soap making process where they remove the glycerin that is made during saponification. You can then buy these blocks of glycerin to make melt and pour soap so that you don’t have to handle lye yourself, but the process of making the glycerin base still involved lye on the producers end. The reason we don’t include lye on the ingredients list is because it is cooked out in the process of soaping. When the oils and the lye solution mix, the chemical reaction that happens is saponification which makes soap. There seems to be a misconception floating around the internet that you can make soap without lye, but really what they mean is that you can buy a soap base (which was made from a oils and lye on the producer’s end) and melt it down and add the fragrance yourself without the dangers of dealing with lye since the soap was already made elsewhere. The short story is…
Saponified oils = Soap and Glycerin = a byproduct of soap making.

The chemicals you typically find in soap are added detergents, preservatives, and sudsing agents. These are the ingredients you will never find in our soap since I found these ingredients irritated my skin. Also, we do pH test our soaps to make sure they are around 8-9 which is where you want soap to be to cleanse the skin gently. (As a reference, Dr Bronnor’s Castile soap tends to be around 10.)

All that to say, I hope you find a soap that works for you! If all soap irritates your skin, you can look into cleansing grains. It’s a mixture of grains and clays that exfoliate and cleanse the skin. Might be a good soap free option for you!

Best of luck in your search for a soap that works for you!
Kelley