Everywhere I go…..I look at, smell and touch soap and sometimes actually buy it. Not that I’m short of soap…but I really like to know what’s going on in the World of Handmade Artisan Soap. Once, I found a black soap from Portugal….it was clay, and made with lots of olive oil. I loved it…and it helped inspire our West Coast Mud Bar with Spruce and Fir local essential oils and from the Coast of Northern B.C.
I tried a lovely Honeysuckle soap from a large American company making natural products…. the Honeysuckle was a synthetic fragrance, but I loved the feel of the soap. I found they had it made in France…from Palm Oil. That was many years ago, and Palm was unavailable in Canada, so Bill and I went to Portland where tankers of oil came in and the palm was shipped to food suppliers for taco chips, Fritos, etc. We brought home two large barrels in the van, across the border, and made soap. It was another soap epiphany, and we still use it.
On our recent holiday down South, we travelled and hiked around Southern California, and checked out soap as we went along. Found a really nice, totally natural Lavender Oatmeal soap…nice lather, great scent…but….they used large steel-cut oats, the kind we eat! It made for a pretty scrubby bar, actually too rough, and the oats fell out as we used it.. We always use the quick cooking oats for soap. They are smaller, thinner, and I think make a better soap. They just kind of melt when you use the bar…..so, I thought our Lavender Oatmeal won!
Next, I found a really nice bar superfatted with every good thing you could add to a soap; cocoa butter, shea butter, aloe vera, I forget what else! It felt wonderful on the skin, and had a soft silky lather. But, a thumb print remained when pressed, and it lasted maybe 1/3 as long as our bars…. just too soft…..so We Won Again!
Lots of other soaps looked or smelled great, or had appealing packaging and cute quirky names…but….I didn’t try them. Usually, it was the fragrance. Anything synthetic and just too strong meant instant rejection. Most handmade soap I saw was neatly cut, although some looked like they had been cut on big machines, not on the handmade cutters most of us use. The thing that really impressed me the most though, were the combinations of essential oils that the artisans used to create their really exotic bars.
p.s. You may have guessed this is my own personal soap contest, and we usually win!
p.s.p.s. We don’t ALWAYS win!
Linda
