All Natural?
“Are your products all natural?”
Hello again. Continuing on from last week, I decided to cover another commonly asked question that many soap and cosmetic makers hear rather often. It’s such a common question, actually, that I bet we can’t get through a single show without hearing it. It is more common than the gratuitous,“Are you really witches?”!!!
The short answer to this question is “No.” But, as with most things, it’s really not that simple. Our soap is made by combining various plant oils, like olive and coconut oil, with Sodium Hydroxide. Sodium Hydroxide is made in a lab. It CAN be made by collecting the ashes of burned hardwoods, combining them with water and filtering this solution through straw and sand until it’s clear and then heating this solution to increase the potency to the point that soap can be made with it like our ancestors did. This is not really practical anymore, is not at all cost effective, and it’s not easy to determine the proper solution density. So we use lab created sodium hydroxide.
Our colorants are a mix of natural and lab created as well. We use some botanical colorants made from dried plant material, activated charcoal, various micas and even “lake pigments” (for instance, a food dye) along with Bio-glitters to make things even more fun!
While Mica is a natural substance, we use lab made micas for two reasons: human rights and safety. Firstly, most natural micas are mined by children in third world nations. These “mines” are just holes dug in the ground that often collapse, injuring and killing many children each year. We do not support this! Additionally, Natural micas are formed with other minerals that are not human safe and they are not able to be fully separated in processing, so we wouldn't use something like that in our products.
Lab made micas are identical to natural micas without human suffering and dangerous minerals. Lakes are just dyes in a liquid solution. One of the advantages is that some colors can only be lab made if they don’t occur in nature. Finally, bio-glitters are made from biodegradable cellulose fibers (Wood) instead of polyester.
These lab-made materials are actually safer than the alternative, hence the reason we use them. We research all of our ingredients extensively and will not use anything that is even slightly questionable. We care too much about you, the environment and ourselves! We use everything we make and frequently test new products on ourselves so we know that what we sell is a quality that we are happy with before we let it out there for everyone else.
Some of our labels show very simple ingredient names on them and some show the “scary” sounding scientific name. This is just because of the labeling laws regarding the various products. Remember, EVERYTHING out there has a scary sounding scientific name in addition to the common name. An ingredient is not bad just because it is hard to pronounce. Here are a few examples for you…
Sodium Chloride = Salt
Mangifera Indica = Mango
Zingiber officinale = Ginger
Methylsulfonylmethane = MSM, a great skin loving compound that causes your body to make antioxidants.
Cetyl & Stearyl Alcohol = We have been led to believe that “Alcohol” is bad because it dries our skin out. This is not always the case. The type of alcohol matters. Cetyl and Stearyl alcohol are high molecular alcohols that are used to prevent oils and water from separating. Low molecular alcohols, like denatured alcohol, are the ones that dry your skin and force your body to produce more natural oils to compensate, thus making oily skin even more oily!
So, you can see that not everything that has a weird name is bad, it’s just science. And Art without Science is just art, but when Art and Science meet, MAGIC HAPPENS! See you next time!
