Natural Handmade Soap and Your Skin
From olive oil to avocado oil to mango butter, there are reasons as to why it’s beneficial to seek out natural ingredients in your personal cleansing products.
Every person is part of nature, and your skin may crave a natural soap sort of pampering. At Island Thyme Soap Company, we take special care to not only use perfected and traditional cold-processed soap making techniques, but to make sure that what goes into our soaps is just what nature intended.
Soap is a substance used with water for washing and cleaning created by combining fatty acids (fats, oils and butters) an alkaline solution and heat. Instead of using water to make our alkaline solution, we use coconut milk!
Fats and oils are composed of triglycerides; three molecules of fatty acids attach to a single molecule of glycerol. The alkaline solution brings about a chemical reaction known as saponification. There are various fatty acid varieties, each differing in molecular composition. When used in soapmaking, each fatty acid variety will make a soap that has its own unique characteristics.
Different oils used in soapmaking have differing proportions of these various fatty acids and provide various properties to the soap.
Properties of Lauric Acid: Hard bar, excellent cleansing, lots of fluffy lather, but can be drying to skin
Properties of Linoleic Acid: Conditioning, silky feel
Properties of Myristic Acid: Hard bar, cleansing, fluffy lather
Properties of Oleic Acid: Conditioning, slippery feel, stingy lather, kind to skin
Properties of Palmitic Acid: Hard bar, cleansing, stable lather
Properties of Ricinoleic Acid: Softer bar, conditioning, moisturizing, lots of fluffy, stable lather, kind to skin
Properties of Stearic Acid: Hard, long lasting bar, stable lather.
It's determining just the right percentage of these properties that's the key to creating luxury handcrafted soap and just soap. Eco-Musings Soapery and Such carefully developed a premium "recipe" using just the right combination of oils and butters to produce the desired properties in the finished bar.
We use a plethora of natural ingredients to make our luxury soap.
Coconut Milk for our alkaline solution. Coconut milk is the liquid that comes from the grated meat of a brown coconut. The color and rich taste of coconut milk can be attributed to the high oil content. Most of the fat is saturated fat.
Olive Oil is high in oleic fatty acid providing the slippery feel and hardness to the bar. It's also a very kind to the skin.
Coconut Oil is high in lauric fatty acid and myristic fatty acid. It's what provides the extra cleansing properties and creates lots of fluffy lather. Since the deep cleansing action can feel drying, we add even more emollients (superfat)
Avocado Oil is also high in oleic fatty acid and linoleic fatty acid. It contains vitamins A, D, and E. making it a nourish oil.
*Palm Oil is high in palmitic fatty acid. It adds to the hardness and stability of the lather. This is the oil that many soapmakers choose to use as a plant based substitute for tallow or lard.
Palm Kernel Oil is high in lauric fatty acid and stearic fatty acid. It contributes to hardness, cleansing properties and bubbly lather.
Mango Butter is high in oleic fatty acid and stearic fatty acid. It's a very moisturizing oil and what we add for to balance the deep cleansing properties of the coconut oil.
Castor Oil is very high in ricinoleic fatty acid and contains linoleic fatty acids. It brings conditioning and moisturizing properties and lots of fluffy, stable lather.
We also use premium phthalate-free fragrance and essential oils, natural clays, natural emollients, and cosmetic mica for colorants.
That's IT!
Absolutely no synthetic detergents or surfacants, synthetic chemicals, preservatives, petroleum products, SLS, phthalates or parabens or triclosan.
*Our palm oil is sustainably sourced from a small family owned organic farm in South America.
As you can see by what goes in our recipe, our soap very gently cleans, has a wonderfully creamy yet fluffy lather and is a long lasting hard bar of soap. We are known for our unique scents.
We use only the finest food grade oils and butters, fragrance and essential oils. While these natural elements are no miracle cure for growing old, they do provide what's needed to gently cleanse the skin without synthetic or harsh detergent ingredients often found in the mass-produced bars lining store shelves. Body wash is usually a detergent, or a soap-like product containing extra chemicals called surfactants to act as emulsifiers or foaming agents.
Mass-produced soaps and body wash may be easy in terms of convenience, the ingredients used to keep costs low are the same ingredients that can strip away the protective barrier nature provides your skin.
In addition to our soap being gentle on skin, it's also gentle on the environment and that's very important to who we are. Since we use only food-grade oils they are also easily broken down in the environment. We responsibly source our oils, butters and essential oils before purchasing and use organic and sustainable palm oil.