What's Actually in My Soap

And why I use a glycerin base.

I want to tell you how my soap is made, because I would rather you hear it from me than work it out from an ingredient list.

Every PureButterMelts bar starts with a melt-and-pour soap base. I buy it already made — goat's milk, oatmeal, buttermilk, or clear glycerin - then I melt it down, add what I have chosen for that particular bar, and pour it into molds. That is the process. There is no lye in my kitchen and no six-week cure.

What is in the base

Here is the part most brands leave out. A melt-and-pour base is a manufactured product, and it contains things that do not sound like a farmers market:

Water, sorbitol, propylene glycol, stearic acid, glycerin, lauric acid, sodium lauryl sulfate, sodium hydroxide, coconut oil, silica, titanium dioxide — plus whatever gives that base its name, like goat milk or oatmeal.

Sodium lauryl sulfate is a detergent. It is what makes the bar lather. Titanium dioxide is what makes an opaque bar opaque. Sodium hydroxide is lye — it is in every true soap ever made, including the from-scratch kind. It has simply already done its work by the time the base reaches me.

I am naming these because you are going to read them on my product pages anyway. I would rather be the one who told you.

Why I chose this

The honest answer is that it fits the life I actually have.

Cold-process soap — the kind made from scratch with oils and lye — takes four to six weeks to cure before it can be used. It also requires handling lye safely, which means a clear workspace and no small people wandering in. I have two children I homeschool, a part-time job in the evenings, and a business I run in the hours that are left. A six-week cure and an open container of caustic soda are not things I can responsibly build a production day around right now.

There is a second reason, and it has less to do with me. A base gives me consistency. Every Goat's Milk bar you order behaves the way the last one did. With cold process, small differences in temperature and cure time change the bar. If you have dry, easily irritated skin and you have finally found something that does not bother it, that predictability matters more than the romance of the method.

What I actually do

The base is the starting point, not the product. What I bring is the choosing.

I decide that the turmeric bar gets real turmeric root, ginger oil and lemon peel and that its gold comes from the root, not from a colorant I added. I decide the French Clay bar gets illite and kaolin. I decide the Yoni bar goes on a buttermilk base with pink clay and apple cider vinegar, and that its label says external use only in every single field, because it is the most scrutinized thing I make.

I decide what stays out, too. No essential oils at all in the Goat's Milk bar, because it is the one I point people toward when their skin is reacting to everything. No fragrance where fragrance-free is the entire point.

That is the craft. It is smaller than "I make soap from scratch," and it is true.

What I will not tell you

I am not going to tell you my soap is chemical-free. Everything is a chemical, and a base with SLS in it is not what people mean when they say that.

I am not going to tell you it treats anything. It is soap. It cleans your skin and, if I have done my job, leaves it feeling comfortable instead of tight.

And I am not going to imply I make it from scratch. Some makers do, and they have earned the right to say so. I do not, right now. If that ever changes, I will say so here first.

What this means for you

Read the label. Not just mine, all of them. If a brand tells you their soap is free from harsh detergents and the ingredient list has sodium lauryl sulfate in it, those two things cannot both be true.

Every PureButterMelts product page carries its full ingredient list. Not a marketing summary of it. The list.

And if you would rather have something with no detergent base in it at all, my body butters and oils are a different story, those I formulate myself, and the lists are short enough to read in one breath.

— Kathy