Why Shea Butter?

“Why do we use Shea Butter in practically everything?”

Shea nut

Unless you never read the labels on things you buy (Shame on you!), you will have noticed that Shea butter is in almost every product we sell. To date, we only sell 2 products without Shea butter and that is only because we couldn’t cram it in there somehow! It really is that amazing for your body. You can eat it and enjoy various benefits, but it really shines as a skin loving ingredient in your skin care routine. Let's explore this fantastic ingredient.

Shea butter is technically a tree nut product. But unlike most tree nut products, it’s very low in the proteins that can trigger allergies. There is no medical documentation of an allergic reaction from topical usage. Shea butter doesn’t contain chemicals known to dry out skin, and it doesn’t clog pores. It’s good for practically every skin type!

Shea butter is typically used for its moisturizing effects. These benefits are tied to shea’s fatty acid content, including two saturated fats, Stearic and Palmitic, AND 2 unsaturated fats, Oleic and Linoleic. When you apply shea topically, these oils are rapidly absorbed into your skin. They restore lipids and rapidly create moisture. This restores the barrier between your skin and the outside environment, holding moisture in and reducing your risk of dryness. The balance of fatty acids also means that it will not make your skin oily looking. 

The above listed fatty acids are also why Shea butter is such a great soap making ingredient. Each of the four acids contributes to a better bar of soap. Stearic and Palmitic contribute to a harder, longer lasting bar and to the lather of the bar. While Oleic and Linoleic make for a moisturizing and creamy bar with nice “slip”.

Shea Butter is also (DEEP BREATH) Anti-inflammatory, Anti-bacterial, Anti-fungal, promotes antioxidant activity, boosts collagen production, promotes cellular regeneration of skin, adds sun protection and MAY aid with acne, reduce stretch marks and scarring, reduce wrinkles, help heal wounds, and can soothe insect bites, sunburns, eczema, dermatitis and psoriasis. WOW! That is a ton of benefit from a single ingredient. It’s a wonder that everyone isn’t using it in their skin care products. 

All of these wonderfully amazing benefits come from the fact that Shea butter contains the following important ingredients.

• The triglycerides linoleic, palmitic, stearic, and oleic fatty acids, ingredients that balance oils on your skin

• vitamins A, E, and F, antioxidant vitamins that promote circulation and healthy skin cell growth

• cetyl esters, the waxy part of the shea nut butter that conditions skin and locks in moisture. This is the ingredient that makes it a great addition to soap as it remains in its original form once soap is made.

So, I think we can all agree that our desire to add Shea butter to as many of our products as possible is a very good idea. We will continue to use this fantastic ingredient and hope that you love the fact that we do! Until next week…

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!

What is soap?

“What, exactly, is handmade soap and how is it better than the stuff in stores?”

Selection of our previous soaps

We get asked this often from friends, family, fellow vendors, that random person behind us in the grocery store checkout line, at shows or just about anywhere. Yes, we hear this question a LOT!

In order to answer this, we need to define what soap actually is. “Soap” is a legal term defined by the FDA as a product that is…

• primarily composed of alkali salts of fatty acids

• AND it is those alkali salts that are the primary contributor to cleaning

• AND it is intended to only clean.

This is not a clear definition to most people since they probably don’t know what alkali salts and fatty acids are. And to complicate matters further, we tend to loosely call products that don’t contain any soap in them as “soap,” just as all facial tissue is called “Kleenex.” I think we can clear this up quickly, though, so let’s start.

First, most handmade soap is made by combining various plant and/or animal oils (fats) with a solution of water and lye (the alkali). These oils all have various fatty acids in them that tend to give the soap different attributes like hardness, or “slip,” or amount of lather. When various oils are blended with the water and lye solution, it frees the fatty acids to combine with the lye and eventually reform the fatty acids into fatty salts. This is the ‘science part’ of our motto that “WHEN ART AND SCIENCE MEET MAGIC HAPPENS.”

Another way to explain it may be that soaps are made from natural ingredients, such as plant oils and butters (avocado oil, coconut oil, “vegetable oil,” shea butter, etc.) or acids derived from animal fat (tallow or lard). Synthetic detergents on the other hand, are man-made chemical derivatives.

All you need to really know is that handmade soaps are better for you and your health than most of the store bought products on the market for many reasons. The primary reason is because most of those products that you buy in a grocery store or pharmacy aren’t actually soap, but are the synthetic detergents I just mentioned above. Most of the ingredients in these detergents are not bad. They actually clean extremely well. That is where the problems begin however…most clean TOO WELL.

That’s right. Synthetic detergents clean too well. They strip too much of the natural protective oil that our body produces and that is why many of us feel dry and itchy after a shower, usually making us run to use our favorite hand or body lotion. Synthetic detergents also contain chemicals that are added for various other reasons.

• Pthalates make the fragrance stick to your skin so you smell like your soap. They have been linked to cancer, childbirth defects and other issues.

• Parabens are often added as preservatives in store cleansers and many other cosmetic products. They have been linked to infertility, breast cancer and hormone imbalances.

• Sulfates are often added to store cleansers to aid in cleansing. Most skin types do not do well with that level of oil stripping.

Most handmade soaps and related products are made without these potentially harmful additives, ours included. Our family uses all of our products so we wouldn’t put these additives in anything that we use on our children or ourselves for so many reasons!

Many people don’t realize that synthetic detergents have also been linked to negative impacts on the environment as well. At the 2015 National Climate Change Conference in Paris, different actions were agreed by 195 nations in favor of a more sustainable planet with the motto, “long live the planet, long live humanity, long live life itself.” This is just the tip of the iceberg in the knowledge of the effects of the use of synthetic detergents to the environment and will hopefully spark you to search for sustainable and alternative methods of cleansing that will not harm that blue marble that we live on.

But, we digress. The final part of the definition of soap is the real tricky part for handmade soap makers. Soap makers can only claim that their product cleans. That’s it. Now, we also know that many ingredients that we add to our soaps can and do have other beneficial effects as well, for instance, certain clays are known to draw impurities out of the skin or certain butters are known to be “nourishing” to the skin. However, we can NEVER claim that our soaps have these effects!

If you think about the process of saponification or soap making, there is no way to guarantee that the raw items contained in the soap will have the same attributes at the end of the process because there were chemical changes to them. And legally, these claims would change our soap from a cleanser to the category of a cosmetic or drug. These latter two items have much stricter regulations, but will allow the maker to claim exfoliating effects, moisturizing effects, and even the ability to improve eczema among others.

So, soap is a cleanser made from fats combined with lye. It is safer and less damaging to your skin and also comes with delightful fragrances and colors that just make bathing more enjoyable. We will continue to only use quality ingredients that are safe for you and the environment. We will never use bad ingredients for any reason. We value our customers, our planet and ourselves too much.