Is natural soap better?
When I sat down to write this blog, I knew I had a behemoth of a task ahead of me: how do I even define what's natural?
In the soap industry, you learn quickly something that most lay people don't realize, which is that the word natural is not regulated. Like, at all. Anybody can use it to mean anything. Really. So we could put "all natural" on every single bar we make, even though we sometimes use fragrance oils or colours created in a lab. So why don't we?
For us, the answer is actually quite simple: integrity. Sure, the word natural isn't regulated, but people sure have a certain idea in their heads when they hear it. Most people would agree that a potato is natural and a Twinkie is not, for example. It becomes less clear as we add more nuance to the conversation, but one thing seems pretty obvious to me. The vast majority of people don't believe that something synthesized in a lab is natural. So why on earth would we mislead our customers by saying everything we put in our soap is natural when some of our ingredients don't fit that bill?
If we want to get picky, the honest truth is that almost no soap is natural. Not even the ones that people tell you are natural. Modern soapers use lye to cause the chemical reaction that makes soap, and there's no way around it. There's no way to make soap without lye, and lye is overwhelmingly made in a lab. The only way to not use lab-made lye is to make your own potassium lye using wood ash and a lot of time and energy. The problem is, the finished result is extremely variable. There would be no way to know exactly how strong your lye is, and that's a recipe for disaster—how do you know how much to use, so that there's none left in the soap and it won't burn your customers' skin? Plus, it makes a very soft soap that melts away quickly, which is why potassium lye (even the lab-made kind) is almost exclusively used to make liquid soap.
So if you're buying bar soap from a soap maker, it's got a lab-made ingredient in it: sodium hydroxide. If using lye means soap is unnatural, that would render the whole concept of natural soap moot. So we make an exception for lye and consider our soaps with only plant-based colours and essential oils for scent to be natural, because they're as natural as they can be. The rest, we call what it is: good soap, which happens to contain synthetics.
You might be wondering why we don't just use natural colour and scents for all our soaps. Well, to understand that, we'll need a little more nuance.
Can you use essential oils in soap?
Sure, you can. But should you? Debatable. I wrote a whole article on why fragrance oils are better than essential oils in soap.
The gist of it is that essential oils actually don't perform well in soap at all. Think about it: lye converts oils into soap. So unless you specifically design an oil to withstand that chemical reaction, it doesn't last long in soap. So usually essential oil soaps don't have any scent left after a few months. Plus, it's not clear if any of the purported benefits of the essential oils are retained once they undergo the soap-making process, so what's the point?
On the other hand, fragrance oils that are designed to work in soap last much longer. They create a better end product, and are much more tightly regulated for safety factors like causing skin irritation. (Did you know cinnamon essential oil could burn your skin? And because some soapers assume natural = safe, they use it anyway. Yikes!)
There are a few essential oils that work well in soap and keep their scent a bit longer. One of them is lavender, which we use regularly in our Lemon Lavender soap. Fun fact: because lemon retains its scent for a shorter time, the bar smells like only lavender by about a year into its life. Neat, eh?
Why can't you use natural colours in soap?
Sometimes, you can. But the trouble is that saponification (the process where lye turns the oils into soap) is a pretty hostile process, and a lot of plant matter can't survive it—it just burns or turns brown. The plants that survive it, go for it! But we stick to a select few natural colours that work well, which we'll discuss a bit more below.
Alkanet root powder
Alkanet is a plant that has beautiful burgundy roots, and the powder can be infused into oil. This creates a gorgeous, bright red oil. The colour is PH-dependent, though. So when you add the (very alkaline) lye to it, it turns a blue colour! Because saponification lowers the PH a bit in the end, the colour settles into a kind of purple hue. Somehow, it retains this pretty colour just like magic!
Alkanet is one of the beautiful mysteries of the plant colourant world, and we love working with it for our Lemon Lavender soap.
We also have a YouTube video showing what alkanet-infused oil looks like before soap-making, during and after, which is pretty interesting!
Activated charcoal
This is usually made from either bamboo or coconut, and it's basically plant matter that's been burned and powdered. Because the plant has already been thoroughly burned, it makes sense that the colour can withstand saponification! When mixed into soap, it makes a very pretty dark grey to black colour. Some folks also believe it has benefits for the skin, which is an added perk if that's your thing!
This beautiful black colourant is a regular in our soaps (both for the main colour and for darkening other colours), showing up in Charcoal Facial, Barber Shop, various Pride flag soaps and even our Galactic Grape kids' soap!
We have a YouTube video showing how activated charcoal looks in soap, if you're curious!
Natural clays
Perhaps because clays aren't plants, they hold up really well in soap! You can get beautifully-coloured illite and kaolin clays, which we sometimes use in our soaps. For example, you can get purple Brazilian clay, French green clay and a rosy pink clay. The latter is part of our regular roster because we use it in our Clay Facial soap, and we use other coloured clays for limited-edition soaps, too!
For a goofy video involving clay as a colourant, you can check us out using red clay in soap! (It's for our now discontinued "Baked Clay" soap, so there are plenty of jokes about altered mental states involved...)
Why are natural soap ingredients better?
Honestly, they aren't always better. But we as humans tend to trust Mother Nature better than science, it seems. Possibly for good reason. I mean, Mother Nature isn't destroying the environment at record rates for the sake of making a buck, so there's always that.
But the trouble is: for any ingredient, there are human interventions. Even something seemingly very natural like salt has to be processed by a human. Salt mines are awful for both people and planet, and that's not the fault of the salt itself. So folks opt for sea salt instead, hoping to avoid those pitfalls, and crossing their fingers that the company selling the salt is doing it responsibly. Essential oils are the same. Some companies are fine and doing things relatively harmlessly, and others are endangering plant species so they can make a buck. The nuance here really matters.
The one upside of synthetic ingredients is that we can only use thoroughly-regulated ones that have a track record of being safe. We actually prefer synthetic micas to colour our soaps because mined micas fall into the same trap of awful environmental and human exploitation that mined salt does. And we absolutely prefer lab-made lye so that we know how to safely measure the right amount to be used up in the soap-making chemical reaction!
Honestly, in this day and age, to be totally anti-synthetic is to be anti-science. Science gives us lots of things that keep us safe, from vaccines to clean tap water and seatbelts for our cars. The evidence is there to say that many synthetic things are safe. And the science may change, and if it does, we'll change as well. That includes on natural things like essential oils. Just recently, the usage rate for cinnamon essential oil was brought from <0.5% right down to 0% (for comparison, the normal usage for lavender is 3-7%). As in, they figured out that there simply wasn't a safe way to use cinnamon on the skin that wouldn't cause irritation. So the standard changed. Science is great that way!
What we can promise is that no matter what, we will continue to make evidence-based decisions about what is and isn't safe to put in our products. We take into account the impact on people and planet, and (sometimes) how much the thing costs. As in, there's no point in putting something lovely in our soap if it'll mean you have to pay $100 per bar of it! Talk about defeating the purpose.
And crucially, labelling matters. We will never purposely mislead our customers by misrepresenting what's in our soap. Ingredient lists will always be transparent, so that important concerns like allergies and skin sensitivities are easier for our customers to manage.
The takeaway
We're a company that makes things for our customers to use on their bodies, and because of that, our top priority is making sure those things only have safe ingredients in them. Just as we won't put poison ivy in our soaps just because it's natural, we also won't package everything in plastic just because we can when (biodegradable) paper will do just fine. We encourage all soap makers to take an evidence-based approach to making decisions about what's safe for both people and planet and use integrity with their labelling at all times. Hopefully, if we do so, everyone will be able to enjoy gorgeous, handmade soap that's just right for them.