“Soap Free” Soap
A few years ago we were on holiday (it was, of course, a cruise!), and at one of our stops the town had put on a market day for the visiting cruise ship. I was keen….who doesn’t love a good market? And it’s nice to be a shopper rather than a stall holder for a change!
It was a pretty good market with a wide variety of stalls - I bought some of my favourite costume jewellery at this market! And excitedly for me, there were two soap makers. The first was a lovely lady who made cold process soap, same as me. We chatted for some time and compared notes. It was nice!
The other soap maker was a different story…
He had a large sign proclaiming he made “soap-free soap”. Well. Seeing as I know there is no such thing, I couldn’t help myself. I asked him to explain “soap-free soap”. After a rather heated exchange, during which he declared repeatedly that because he didn’t add lye to his “soap”, it’s soap free soap! He even pulled out a carton from his supplier to prove to me that he was, in fact, making soap free soap.
The product he was using is known as “Melt & Pour”. You chop it up, melt it down, add colour and fragrance, then pour it into a mould and let it harden, and voila! You have soap! He apparently failed to recognise that lye is added to Melt & Pour during manufacturing. It’s allowed to saponify, then it’s sold uncoloured and unfragranced. As with all soap, there’s no lye left in the final product, but lye is still used in its production.
I eventually gave up trying to convince him he was wrong and walked away. Actually, I was dragged away, lol. But I was annoyed for anyone who bought his product, thinking they were getting something that they weren’t. There is no such thing as soap-free soap. There are soap-like products which use synthetic detergents to do the job of soap, but this man was selling soap, and claiming it wasn’t soap.
There really is no getting around using lye to make soap. It’s the magic ingredient…without it, you’ve got nothing more than a big bowl of oil!
I’ll cover the wonders of lye in a future blog post.
Stay tuned…and stay bubbly!
