(03-18-2017, 09:14 AM)andrewjs18 Wrote: Rod,
What made you want to get into making soaps and then shaving items?
We started with bath soaps, just as a way to remove some of the unnecessary chemical fillers in our lives. I don't have particularly sensitive skin, but I'd never cared for the way my skin felt as it dried after taking a shower. I didn't think that having to coat myself in lotion to prevent feeling itchy should be the norm. A bit of further exploration led to me realizing that there was a high probability that what I was experiencing was not only common for a majority of the population, but easily preventable. It's not profitable to sell good soap on a mass scale, so what they do is harvest the glycerin that is a naturally occurring byproduct of the saponification process and sell it to be used in cosmetics and other industries. They add in fillers like sulfates and other detergents and hardeners and sell it to the consumer for a buck a bar or less. Glycerin is a humectant, and removing that from your soap will exacerbate the drying nature of washing yourself with a soap. The sulfates are common skin irritants, and removing them from your shower routine prevents your skin from being completely stripped of oils.
I've gotten away from the original question here and started ranting. Sorry. Long story short, I wanted something better for my skin. I now have that I would never go back to commercial soap or body wash. A couple of years ago Mandy and I took a trip back to central Texas, and forgot to bring a bar of our soap for the trip. We realized it at the hotel, but figured we'd be okay for a couple of days. Wrong. After using a real soap for years now, going back to the normal detergent bar that's passed off as soap made me itch like I'd been rolling around in an ant hill.
As for the shave soap, we got into that in 2012. I was a wetshaver already, but I thought I could probably make a better soap than the two brands I was currently using. I was right, but that didn't mean I was making a good soap. It took until October of 2013 before we finally hit on a formula that worked. We've been on that same formula since, except for the added tweak of removing clay from the formula in May of 2015. At the same time we cut down on our suppliers of raw materials. Rather than chasing sales on tallow, castor, and essential oils, we standardized our suppliers. We only bought what we considered the best ingredients, regardless of prices or sales. It made the biggest difference in our soaps. Like the Papa John's commercials say "better ingredients, better pizza." Well, better ingredients, better soap. Using the same ingredient suppliers also reduced batch to batch variations that can plague handmade soapmakers.
Was that too long?
