Soap. I’ve absolutely been in love with it since I can remember…. the sensuous pleasure of washing with it, passing it through your hands to create the silky lather, the texture and varied scent of it, the feeling of the fabulous lather on my skin, and just how clean and fresh you feel after an encounter with it.

My encounters with soap have been many and varied, starting as a child with the all- purpose carbolic Lifebuoy with it’s nasty reddish raw meat colour and curiously addictive, harsh medicinal,no-nonsense antiseptic scent, which I can recall as if yesterday, conjured as smells are, direct into our consciousness straight from the emotional brain centre, the amygdyla.

I think it is a curiously British phenomena, Lifebuoy….I have seen it only in the old colonial outposts like India, in recent times, but it is not the same any more.

As a child we were pretty broke, and hence had no truck with the “luxury” of new fangled detergents, just good ‘ol Lifebuoy soap in the boiler with the clothes and then through the mangle ( lots of broken butttons) and onto the line, and I loved the faint antiseptic scent in the wind dried sheets and clothes….maybe I missed my calling and should have been a nurse!
We used it for everything, laundry, slapped on burns,washed gravel out of the inevitable childhood skinned knees,on ourselves, the floors…
I “graduated” at aged 8 or thereabouts to Camay, a cheap lurid pink synthetic bar that was suitably glamorised in early 60’s TV commercials by a cheesecake actress called Katie Boyle who slathered the lather theatrically over her face whilst gushing the benefits, hilarious looking back now.

I took a very long time in the bath imitating the screen goddess and managed to work my way through far too many bars to be accommodated by my weekly sixpence pocketmoney so had to cut back on my major Camay habit.

Then I moved on to Pears soap, miraculously transparent, with it’s fantastic history as one of the earliest soaps made in Britain. but mostly for it’s curious spicy smell…..then came Cuticura another interesting black antiseptic bar (I had major zits by now in adolescence)  and along with my Grandmothers herbal formulas was trying anything to look like a 70’s rock chick ( too fat, not hip enough, what’s changed?!)

The twenties saw various soapy fads but my fave was Coty’s Aqua Manda,an early 70’s invention heavy on mandarin and patchouli, and the beginning of the revival of all things natural, and a move to rediscover natural herbal formulae.

To my total delight I found a crumbling but largely intact bar or this at a garage sale last year and once again a sniff takes me straight back to shopping at Biba  in Kensington High st in my nasty smelly afghan coat reeking of patchouli oil…..sigh.

When I began to redicover my granny’s old concoctions and make the early BB products, first on the list was rediscovering the pleasures of those soapy days of delight, and a range of fabulous traditional olive oil and herb soaps was first on the list- very adult and a far cry from those early bars that made your skin dry and stingy.

There is no comparison between a synthetic detergent bar ( commonly called syndets) that is now the most commonly available mass market “soap”- in fact it is no longer real soap at all, just a compacted, boiled, extruded and moulded  mixture of sodium laureth sulphate ( a synthetic foaming agent)anti-oxidants,hardeners, opacifiers and a sickly throat catching synthetic scent that can be smelt at 100 yards away- revolting, and hugely drying to the skin of course.

When I read magazine articles relentlessly and universally saying ” do not use soap on your skin” I want to shout-YES, NOT THE SYNTHETIC “soap!” Clearly they have never experienced the skin moisturising, gentle cleansing pleasure of a real soap bar handmade with olive and coconut oils and only gentle subtle essential oils from plants as a scent.

Our bars have always been skin friendly as a first priority, carefully formulated with rich nut and plant oils such as hemp, mango butter, and jojoba,and a low concentration of essential oils that do not shout at you- are subtle, and hence do not irritate. You can smell their delightful scents up close, unlike the various national “natural” beauty chains where the sickly synthetic scent ( claiming to be natural???)can often be detected well down the street.

Real Soap of course has been around since Roman times, and palm oil ( click on our front page link 100% palm oil free) has been used since the early 1900’s to contribute to the lather and most importantly provide hardness to a fine bar of soap, and all was fine and dandy until the fast food industry kicked in, when massive amounts of palm oil was required to fuel it, AND the personal care industry.

Hence we have deforestation in the primary palm oil production centres of Indonesia and Borneo, and mass planting of palm oil plantations, with countless species of wildlife displaced or killed-primarily the orangutan.

We decide to act over a year ago and replaced palm in all our products, and in our soap bars by upping the coconut oil content, which is more costly, and leads to a bar that performs beautifully as always, but does not last necessarily as long without palm to add hardness.

Hence we are now trialling the addition of soy wax which will add hardness to the bar and make it as long lasting as palm oil once did, but without the environmental cost,  being one of the major crops grown in the USA, and non GMO to boot.

That is why our bars cost more than the average natural soap- being palm oil free actually increased our costs- as well as our bar size which is, at 125 gms, 25% larger than the average natural soap bars around.
Why not rediscover the absolute skin loving pleasure of soap and water with our soap specials on right now?

This entry was posted on Friday, May 7th, 2010 at 3:26 pm and is filed under Ingredients, Skincare Tips, soap addiction and palm oil. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.