Is Handmade Soap Better For Your Skin?

Everyone wants healthy skin and switching to daily use of handmade soap is the best place to start. Typically handmade soap is made of vegetable oils and butters that are rich in antioxidants, vitamins and nutrients that are essential to healthy skin.

Why use natural handmade soap? The benefits of using handmade soap are many: simpler ingredients, fewer chemicals, natural vegetable oils instead of animal fats. All these things are important to many people today. Natural soaps are made in a time-honored fashion. It involves a very simple chemical reaction between oils (or fats) and lye (sodium hydroxide for bars). All soap is made with lye, but there is no lye in the finished product. The chemical reaction converts the lye/fat mixture to glycerin. The glycerin means you have a cleanser with abundant lather that cleans and it does not strip your skin of its natural, protective oils.

Why is Glycerin Important? Glycerin is a humectant. Glycerin is a precious emollient that softens and maintains water balance by attracting moisture to your skin. Glycerin isn’t added to a handmade soap recipe – it’s created during the soap making process! With our natural soaps, however, all of the naturally occurring glycerin remains intact along with all its skin-nourishing benefits. Commercial soap makers often remove the glycerin from their soap and then sell it to the cosmetic and pharmaceutical industries.

Conventional Bar Soaps vs. Handmade

Commercially made soap usually contains detergents, fillers, chemicals, petroleum, high animal fat content (read: sodium tallowate) and irritants like SLS or SLES (sulfates). Commercially made soap tends to be less eco-friendly as well. Natural handmade soaps are made with natural oils, have a high glycerin content, are better for the environment with no detergents, phosphates or sulfates, and are never tested on animals. If you've ever had any skin conditions, like chronic dryness, eczema, psoriasis, or breakouts, you've probably learned to avoid soaps as they can be tough on skin because many contain harsh detergents as well as dyes and fragrance that can irritate sensitive skin. Handmade soaps will cleanse just as well as conventional soaps without any of the irritation. To sum it up, the best soap for your skin is a handmade, rganic, all natural cold process soap bar. Once you've tried one of these lathery treasures, you'll never again be satisfied with 'store-bought' bars.