History

Soaps have been made for millennia. Apart from making fire and cooking food, "saponifying" oil and fat into soap is one of the oldest and simplest organic chemical reactions known to ancient man (and ancient woman!). The earliest recorded evidence of the production of soap dates back to around 2800 BC in Ancient Babylon. A formula for soap consisting of water, alkali and cassia oil was written on a Babylonian clay tablet around 2200 BC. The Ebers papyrus (Egypt, 1550 BC) indicates that ancient Egyptians bathed regularly and combined animal and vegetable oils with alkaline salts to create soap. [1]

Traditional Cold-Process Handmade Soap

Soap was originally made by boiling lard together with lye or potash; hydrolysis of the fats and oils occurred, producing crude soap. For our cold-process, we combine vegetable oils (no animal fats) with an alkali. A vegetable oil is a "triglyceride" which means that three fatty acids of various carbon lengths are attached to a glycerine backbone. The alkali is either sodium (for bars) or potassium (for liquids) hydroxide, made by running electricity through salt water. During the saponification process, the glycerine is split off from the fatty acids, and the fatty acids combine with the sodium or potassium to form soap, while the hydroxide forms water. The result is soap, glycerin and water (no alkali remains).

Our soap retains all the naturally produced glycerine to moisturise skin. Glycerine also keeps our products fresh for a long time without the need for preservatives. Glycerine is in fact more valuable by weight than soap; it's the wonderful skin-loving ingredient. For this reason it is often removed from commercially produced soap and sold for use in other skin care products. Stripped of glycerine, you end up with a detergent based soap needing synthetic moisturising ingredients that can cause dry, itchy skin. This is why mass-produced soap is vastly different to our bars handmade using traditional cold-batch process methods.

Natural Handmade Soaps

Our soaps are handmade in small batches by century's old traditional cold-batch processes using the finest Olive Oil, Coconut Oil, Corn Oil, Sustainable Organic Palm Oil and Castor Oil with our locally pure Scottish Highland water. We then enrich our soaps with natural skin-nourishing, fair trade Shea Butter and Cocoa Butter.
Each bar is scented using pure essential oils. Our handmade soaps produce a rich creamy lather to nourish and moisturise your skin. The naturally occurring glycerine will help to retain your skins moisture. This slow method of soap production takes us about 4-weeks to cure each carefully prepared small batch.

Organic Soaps

Our organic soaps are made with a natural glycerine rich vegetable oil blend, where All of the oils used are sustainably-harvested and Certified Organic. Using the finest quality organic ingredients to produce our soaps not only helps to protect the environment from intensive farming methods and chemical treatment of natural ingredients, but also ensures these benefits are passed directly to your skin. We state over 95% organic on our labels (water is not considered organic).

SLS Surfactant Free Soap

• Our handmade soaps contain no artificial surfactants (foaming ingredients), such as Sodium Lauryl Sulfate (SLS) and Sodium Laureth Sulfate (SLES).
• No artificial moisturising agents such as Propylene Glycol.
• No Parabens are used as preservatives.

source
1. "Soap" in Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia; (Wikimedia Foundation Inc., updated 5 April 2008); available from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soap#History; retrieved 07 April 2008.