Owl Creek Farm » Soaping » A close look at handmade soap ingredients

A close look at handmade soap ingredients

by Amy

On our FAQs page, I’ve details what is in our soaps, but in the interest of keeping that page short, I didn’t give a whole of information. I get frequent emails asking for more information about what is in our soaps, so I thought I’d bring all my answers together here.

As stated in our FAQ page:

“We use premium quality ingredients starting with our custom, exclusive oil blend of tallow, olive oil, coconut oil, castor oil and cocoa butter, which we call our House Blend. This creates a long lasting, hard bar with lots of silky bubbles and lather.”

This blend took some time to get perfect; my goal for the oils in our soap was to be great for all skin types, and work well in all water, be in hard or soft, city or well water. Soap, by definition, is a cleanser, it’s meant to remove oils and dirt from the skin – but with the right oils and formula, you can have a one-two punch with your soap that cleans while leaving your skin soft and moisturized.

  • IMG_1149Tallow – About half our tallow comes from our own organically fed free range cattle, the other half from our Canadian supplier who sells top quality food grade tallow. Tallow helps the soap last longer, makes it harder, and gives it a wonderful lacy lather.
  • Olive Oil – Wonderful for the skin, and strangely enough, adds significant hardness to your soap.
  • Coconut Oil – This solid-at-room-temperature oil can be drying to the skin at higher percentages in soap, but it gives the soap fantastic bubbles – the key is to finding the right amount to get good bubbles, without drying the skin. We’ve found that amount; our soaps have a beautiful bubbly lather and do not dry out your skin!
  • Castor Oil – Excellent for skin conditioning, and when combined with tallow and coconut oil, adds a rich, creamy lather
  • Cocoa Butter – Unlike many companies that use less than 1% of premium ingredients, and often more like 0.1%, our handmade soaps contain nearly 10% cocoa butter for the ultimate in moisturizing.

Continuing from our FAQ page:

“To most of our soaps, we also add oatmeal and kaolin clay, for an added touch of luxury suitable for all skin types.”

Our regular soaps contain finely ground whole oatmeal – rich with oat protein, which is known for it’s skin soothing and moisturizing properties. Our Men’s Line also contains medium ground oatmeal – oatmeal that isn’t ground as fine, to offer exfoliating as well. Kaolin clay is a clarifying natural earth clay, that helps clean out the pores.

Continuing with our ingredients:

“In our scented soaps, we use the highest quality skin-safe fragrance oils and therapeutic grade essential oils available to offer a wonderful and wide variety of scents.”

We have 2 main suppliers for our fragrance oils, both in the US (sorry, no names – we don’t disclose all our secrets). We tried several dozen US and Canadian companies, and have settled on those 2 because they consistently offer extremely high quality fragrances that are actually made in the US, not China or anywhere else. Nearly all our supplies come from Canada, but in the case of fragrance oils, we require, for our own use and well as yours, products that won’t irritate our sensitive skin.

Our essential oils come from Canadian suppliers, and are therapeutic grade. We firmly believe that essentials oils should be treated as medicine, so we use them sparingly for scent only, because the risk of allergy/medical problems are actually greater with essential oils than high quality fragrance oils in our experiences.

Our colours:

“We use cosmetic grade colourants like micas and oxides to many of our soaps for a little added artistic fun!”m-spring1

These colourants are much more skin friendly than the usually FD&C colourants commonly found in the cosmetic industry. I only colour soap (which washes off) – all our other products are uncoloured.

Also! None of our raw ingredients are tested on animals, nor are our final products. We test every single batch, even if the same recipe is used to make 10 batches, to make sure that quality of each is what we want to offer our family, friends, and customers.

P.S. Did you see the new site design? If you find any problems, let us know!

Amy
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