Inside My Soap Studio: Natural Ingredients & Quality Craftsmanship

   Welcome to BodyGlo Soaps studio, a bubbly haven where every bar is crafted with care using the finest natural ingredients, designed to nourish your skin and make you smile!

   Today, I would like to tell you what goes into the quality soaps crafted in our studio. There are many skin loving ingredients that a person can work with when making soap. The options are almost endless. At BodyGlo Soaps, we start with a base of either lard, tallow or coconut. Olive oil plays a big part in the soapmaking, also. And almost every batch of soap is topped off with a touch of castor oil to give stability to the bubbly goodness that you expect from every bar of soap! Many other wonderful oils and butters are also used in our formulas. Palm oil, sustainably sourced of course, makes a wonderful bar of soap and helps with the hardness of the bar. Sweet almond oil, avocado oil, rice bran oil and hemp oil all show up to do their magic. Then we have the decadent butters--shea butter, cocoa butter, kokum butter, mango butter. Each one adds a little extra creamy goodness to the soap.

   Now the only way we can actually have soap is to use sodium hydroxide. Maybe you are more familiar with the term lye. Lye sounds like it might be a bad thing but actually without it we would not have soap! Lye is mixed with some liquid, most generally distilled water, but it can actually be mixed with quite a number of things to create the magic whereby soap is made. Aloe juice is another liquid that can be used. Sometimes goat's milk is used or actually any kind of milk, even that milk you use for breakfast works! Milk helps create a gentle, creamy bar of soap. At BodyGlo Soaps, quite often we use milk powders, including goat's milk, coconut milk, heavy cream powder, buttermilk powder. After lye is combined with the liquid and then blended into the oils, magic happens and soap is created. The lye disappears and leaves behind a beautiful product that cleans everything it encounters.

   After those base ingredients, come many lovely additives, all bringing some special touch to your bubbly experience. A touch of silk is added for a bit of, well, silkiness! French clay, kaolin clay, Brazilian clay all add a lovely slip to the lathery goodness. Sugar is added to create lovely abundant lather. Sodium lactate is added to help with hardening the soap batter and citric acid is added to help with combating soap scum(hopefully!). And then sometimes we dollop in some Greek yogurt and heavy cream--that's right, it's not just for coffee--to up the creaminess of that bar of soap! For a bar with a little extra scrubbiness, in goes some pumice powder or colloidal oatmeal or walnut shells ground so fine. It's really amazing what all can make a great bar of soap! And to top all that off, we add lovely fragrance oils or either essential oils to make you want to just stand and sniff that bar of soap all day! A pop of color is added by way of skin safe micas or even some component of nature. Did you know that Himalayan rhubarb makes the prettiest pink soap? Well, I didn't either before I ventured into the world of soap making! 

   I still have not listed every ingredient that we have ever used but I have told you about most of them! If you look at the listing of each soap that we sell, we have a full list of the ingredients that go into each bar listed there. Try each one and see what your favorite is! If you have suggestions of things you would like us to try, post it in the comments below and we will try to accommodate! Happy Lathering!