Allow me to get up on my soap box (pun intended) for a moment

I love making soap!

More importantly, I love making natural soap.  The old fashioned way, with lye.  There, I said it.  Lye!  Truth be told, you cannot make soap without lye, but unlike the old fashioned days when soap was made with wood ashes and rendered animal fat, we have calculators, and high quality scales that measure down to a single gram, that make sure that every bit of lye is used up, converting high quality oils into gentle, skin-friendly soap. My soaps are calculated with a 7% lye discount which simply means that after all the lye is used up making oils into soap there is 7% of high quality oils left in the bar of soap to condition your skin.

I take great pride in my soap and sometimes have difficulty convincing folks who are used to paying only a couple of bucks for a bar of soap at the grocery store to shell out a few more dollars for my natural soap.
I am told that they love the new "Dove" bar, after all, "it has 1/4 moisture lotion in it", and who can forget the ads that make us fear all the gunk left behind on our skin when we dare to use another's soap?

Hmmm...

Without getting too technical, lotions are waters, oils and emulsifiers.  Emulifiers are needed because oil and water do not want to mix all by themselves.  However, if you were to put lotion into a pot making soap, the emulsified lotion would simply break down into its parts (oil and water) and becomes part of the soap making process.  So, technically, any bar of soap could claim to have lotion added.  Even mine.

However, one has to wonder about the quality of that "lotion" Dove claims to add to their soap.  One of the main ingredients listed is Sodium Tallowate - that is a scientific way of saying saponified beef fat, or, rendered beef fat made into soap with lye!  Doesn't sound so yummy after all, does it?

Need I mention that my soap is made with high quality, food grade, vegan oils such as olive, coconut, soybean, palm, castor, avocado, jojoba, shea butter and mango butter?  All are selected for their unique properties in making a high quality bar of soap that is good for your skin.

Of course using the term soap for what is sold in the grocery stores is a misnomer - most commercial soaps are really what is called a syndet, or synthetic detergent.  The term soap is used loosely because it cleans.  Further, most commercial soaps remove the glycerin, a natural byproduct of soapmaking, and a natural humectant, found in their soap.  They then resell the glycerin for other uses, leaving behind an inferior bar of soap.

I hope this clears things up a bit.