Bubbles, Bubbles Everywhere

I love soap. Rich, luxurious handmade soap. In fact, I can truthfully say I love handmade soap almost as much as I love shoes and purses. If you haven’t tried a bar of handmade soap, then I recommend that you run right out and get one right now.

But first, let me make myself clear, I am not talking about bars of glycerin soap, I am talking about bars of soap made using the Cold Process method. A method that involves mixing the oils, lye and fragrances together in a very specific order and manner. Those who make cold process soap are truly artists, blending everything together to make a bar of wonderfully fragranced, super moisturizing perfection.

These bars almost always contain Saponified olive oil, coconut oil, cocoa butter and shea butter. Naturally, each maker has their own secret recipe. Plus, the most fantastic scents. Each soap maker creates their own unique scents. You could spend your entire life sampling all the different fragrances out there.

Now if you are wondering how I became a soap nut, let me explain. I used to be a body wash kinda girl, didn’t matter what brand or what scent, I tried them all. Sure they worked fine, even smelled pretty good, but I wasn’t completely satisfied with them. A lot of the body wash fragrances seemed all the same to me. I wanted something that smelled truly exotic or fresh.

Then of course, there were the articles that I read that indicated that body wash and commercial soaps are more “detergent” then soap. That the process to make these large batches of soaps takes something fairly natural and turns it into a giant chemical soup.

Enter the bar of handmade soap. Here was something with a short list of ingredients, handmade by a real person. Someone who took real pride in their work, not to mention the scents were amazing. Anything that you could imagine they had. Plus, you may be able to work with the soap maker to customize a scent. So you could have a “designer” fragrance made just for you.

The packaging also appealed to me. No plastic bottles, just a bit of cardboard or tissue paper wrapped around each bar. Although, some of the soap makers go out of their way to pretty up the soap with beautiful wrapping paper and ribbons, which is so much cooler then a plastic bottle. Traveling with the soap is easy, especially with today’s regulations about what you can take on an airline. A solid bar of soap is no problem in your travel kit.

Some bars are gentle enough to work on your face and some are specifically shampoo bars and can give you beautiful, shiny hair (you could even cheat and run the shampoo bar over your entire body). Hey! Sometimes an all in one is just what you need on a morning when you are running really, really late. You can use the soap for EVERYTHING, even shaving your legs.

Come on give it a try, get a wonderful handmade bar and lather up!

~ Jennifer Flaten