Fall 2007
Volume 20
www.alcasoft.com/soapfact/
Friends and neighbors often ask if we are still making soap. Yes, we are and the business keeps growing with the greatest increase occurring in the sales of our liquid soaps. The best seller, by far, is our unscented liquid soap. Lots of customers are buying the liquid soap, unscented, by the gallon.
Once again we like to share with you WHAT IS SPECIAL ABOUT OUR SOAPS? We pride ourselves on making the most natural and mild soap possible. The method we use to make all our soaps is the basic "cold process". The "cold process" has been used by the home soap maker for centuries. In the traditional procedure for home soap making, the glycerine is not removed. One question we are often asked is what type of glycerine we add to our soaps. The answer is, we do not add the glycerine to our soaps. It is generated when the soap is made. Now a little bit of the chemistry of soap making. The reaction which causes the formation of soap occurs when fat or vegetable oil is mixed with an alkali. The fat / oil is split by the alkali into two new substances, soap and glycerine. Thus glycerine is not added but obtained from the very fats and oil used to make the soap. This occurs in all basic soap making ; but with home made soaps, the glycerine is not removed from the soap mixture by salt water as in all other soap making methods.
Glycerine is removed by commercial soap makers, because it is a valuable by- product. It is used in the production of explosives, cosmetics and medicines to mention a few. But leaving glycerine in soap makes the soap an enhanced product. One comment heard about commercial soaps, in general, is that they are drying. Home made soaps are not. Why?. Because the glycerine remains in the soap. Glycerine is a colorless, scentless syrupy compound. Glycerine retains water and is a moisturizer. Glycerine prevents the soap from drying out. Soap with its natural glycerine keeps the soap moist. Soaps without glycerine are dry and they take the moisture from the skin. This is why soaps without their glycerine left in are drying. Solvent properties of glycerine enable home made soaps to remove stains without harshness. By the way the name of the soap making reaction is saponification.
We also make our liquid soaps by the "cold process" batch method. The major difference between making the bars soaps is the alkali base is potash, which makes a soft soap, a thick paste that will never get firm. To the paste we add enough water to dilute soap for ease in customer use. The other special feature is the oil used to make our liquid is pure olive oil no other oils are used. We have not found any other liquid soap on the market made only using olive oil.
For those who really enjoy or need our liquid soap due to chemical sensitivity, we sell the liquid soap by the gallon. The gallon size is only available unscented. Eight 16oz. bottles of the liquid equals a gallon. Eight 16 oz. bottles sell for $5.85 each, totaling $46.80, while 1 gallon sells for $35. This is a savings of $11.80.
We do have one problem with our liquid soap, other than keeping up with the demand. The 16 oz bottles of liquid soap were leaking during shipping. Several customers did complain to us about this and we would replaced the lost soap. We were using a flip top cap on the bottle. This would allow the soap to be squeezed from the bottle. The flip tops covers as we have now discovered do not provide a secure fit as screw tops. Thus we have switch to using screw tops to close our soap bottles, which we already do with the gallon bottles. If any customers would like to receive a flip top , just inform us when you order and we will included the flip separately at a charge of 50 cents.
A question we are asked frequently do we use preservatives in our soap products. The answer is we do not employ preservatives in the soaps. We rely on the natural alkalinity of the soap to keep organisms from growing in our soaps. If a soap has it ph lower enough to encourage the growth of bacteria and molds, toxic preservatives are required to prevent this from occurring. The soaps with lower than the natural ph of soap have two type of additional ingredients the ph lowing agents and the preservative ones. Any extra item introduced in a soap solution can prove to be an irritant. We prefer to keep our soaps to their basic components of soap, glycerine, and water.
We often asked by people to furnish them with information on both soap making and its history. We think we have done a pretty good job of this with The History of Soap Making found at our Web Site. This write-up includes a bibliography. Many of the books listed offer good insight to early American ways. But many of these books are old and hard to locate as they may even be out of print. May we recommend that if you wish to search for this type of information or other good source material on history, you check out the Bearly Read Bookstore. This store is located is in Sudbury Mass, but they are on the Internet at barelyreadbooks.com. They are able to search from books across the internet and ship out across the country.
The purpose of our company is to provide people who have come to appreciate the benefits of hand crafted soap with a high quality handmade soap that is economical enough to use as their everyday personal skin care soap.
As has been our Holiday tradition at the Soap Factory, we have a special that gives you, our customer, a bonus bar of soap for every third 4 bar box of soap you order from now to the end of the year.
When buying gifts for others, remember yourself. In the cold dry months to follow you will want to stock up on a supply of our Castile soaps to keep your skin soft all winter long.
Yours in Suds,
Marietta and Arthur Ellis