About Highland Soap™

Our soaps and skincare products are handmade in the Highlands of Scotland with an emphasis on pure, natural ingredients and herbal therapy. With many of our precious oils, butters and plant ingredients being grown organically, ethically or wild-harvested.

The basics of how our soap is handmade.
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]

COLD-PROCESSED 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Soap was originally made by boiling lard together with lye or potash; hydrolysis of the fats and oils occurred, producing crude soap.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 in our soap). The pure natural soap is then cured for about 4-5 weeks.

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. Mass-produced soap is vastly different to our bars handmade using traditional methods; and once you try Highland Soap™ your skin will not let you use anything else!

NATURAL HANDMADE SOAP
Our natural cold-processed soaps are handmade in small batches by century's old traditional processes using only the purest and finest ingredients. A base of Olive Oil, Coconut Oil, Corn Oil, sustainably-grown Organic Palm Oil and Castor Oil with our locally pure Scottish Highland water is used. No animal fats. We then enrich our soaps with skin nourishing, fairly-traded unrefined Shea and Cocoa butters. Each bar is scented using the purest essential oils and botanicals. 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. Our natural cold-processed soaps are mild on sensitive, dry and babies skin.

ORGANIC AROMATHERAPY SOAP
Our aromatherapy soaps are handcrafted from a natural glycerine rich vegetable oil blend, where all of the vegetable oils used are sustainably-harvested and certified Organic. We then enrich selected soaps with fragrant natural botanicals and essential oils found in herbs, plants, flowers and fruits. Using the finest quality organic ingredients to produce our soaps not only protects the environment from intensive farming methods and chemical treatment of natural ingredients, but ensures these benefits are passed directly to your skin. These soaps gently cleanse and moisturise to keep skin smooth, soft and supple. Made with over 95% ingredients certified Organic. "SLS" Free.

SLS Surfactant Free
Our products contain:

• No artificial surfactants (foaming ingredients), Sodium Lauryl Sulfate (SLS) and its close relative Sodium Laureth Sulfate (SLES)
• No artificial moisturising agents (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.