How is soap made and what do we use here at The Bare Bar LLC?
About
My journey began simply wanting to educate myself on the ingredients in the soaps I was using. That led me to wanting to learn about each ingredient and the potential benefit each was being marketed to have. In my research, I learned how many, of those ingredients, are not sustainably sourced or obtained in environmentally friendly ways. I also learned that most soaps do not even contain a large enough percentage of the ingredients that are good for you to make them beneficial.
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I wanted to do better.
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There are 3 types of soap making processes. My soap is considered castile soap and made with the 7 ingredients listed here on my website. Below you can learn more about the process I use as well as the other types of soap making!
What is Lye and do we use it?
People often ask if our soap is made with lye. The answer is YES! All real soap is made with lye. Any skin or hair cleansing product made without sodium hydroxide is not soap, it is detergent.
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Soap itself does not contain lye, but the process to make soap does use lye. The lye gets neutralized the organic chemical reaction that creates the soap which is saponification
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What is cold process soap?
There are 3 types of soap making; cold process, hot process and melt and pour.
Melt and pour is soap that has already been through the saponification process (meaning yes it has been made with lye) but now can be remelted down for the consumer to add colors or scents to it. You typically cannot add more oils or other ingredients as the soap has already been formulated.
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Hot process soap is the process of making soap from scratch using lye, oils, colorants and other ingredients while using heat to make the saponification process happen.
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Cold process soap does not use any outside heat source and saponification takes 24 - 48 hours. The reason it takes so long for soap to cure after this time is for the remaining water to evaporate from the soap to harden the bar for long use. Cold process allows more workable time to create the swirls, designs and patterns you see in our soaps.
