Dewin' Soap: Introduction

My name is Sean and this is my first blog entry and our story.  I was intrigued by candle-making as I enjoyed making candles growing up and wanted to make more candles.  As I researched how to make candles, I realized, there were a few things in common with candle making and soap making—scents, molds and coloring.  When I felt I had gained enough knowledge, I made my first batch of soap—I was hooked!  After waiting for the soap to cure I used my first handmade bar of soap.  Desert Dew Soaps was born.

Desert Dew Soaps makes and sells quality handmade soap for the whole body.  We strive to produce soap with a variety of oils and butters with each adding a different quality to the soap. There will be a post on the qualities each ingredient brings to the soap in a later blog post.  Some add moisture, some add skin protectant and actually attract moisture to the skin; while others make for a hard, long-lasting cleansing bar.

Soap itself is drying to the skin, but during the manufacturing process a normal byproduct is glycerin (many of the commercial makers strip glycerin out of the soap).  Glycerin is used to help moisturize the skin.  Glycerin also makes the bar of soap a little softer.  I imagine one reason, though just an educated guess on my part, for commercial manufacturers to strip the glycerin from soap is to make the bar harder and thus last longer.  Remember soap dries the skin out thus the need for additional cost of lotions, etc.  

Soap is made with sodium hydroxide also known as lye.  ALL soaps require an alkali.  Lye acts as the alkali in the soap-making  process creating a chemical reaction.  The reaction is a chemically complicated one but can be summarized as follows.

The easiest definition to understand, I have found, for the soap-making process can be found on wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soap#Soap-making_processes).  There are essentially only two ways to make soap, the hot process and cold process. Commercial makers of soap use a modified process of the hot method, a detailed example can be found at the above link.  According to M. Wilcox (2000), the earliest known record of the use and making of soap-like material is found around 2800 BC in ancient Babylon, where a formula for soap consisting of water, alkali, and cassia oil was written on a Babylonian clay tablet around 2200 BC. In summary…

Fats from animals and vegetable oils are the main materials that are saponified.  There are other substances such as beeswax that must be calculated into the soap batch because a portion of beeswax does saponify.  These oils are called triglycerides which are then treated with a strong base such as lye.  This reaction concludes with the production of soap and glycerin.

Now, lets get a few concepts and words defined.

1. Handmade soap - soap that is made without machinery
2. Soap - soap is the result of a chemical reaction (saponification) between a fat (oil) and an alkali.
3. Alkali - a chemical compound that neutralizes acids.  In making soap, your oil or fat is the acid and the result is a salt we call soap.
4. Saponification - is a chemical process that produces soap, usually from fats (oils) and lye (sodium hydroxide, NaOH).
5. Triglycerides - triglycerides are the main constituents of natural fats and oils. These are also the fats responsible for heart disease.
6. Detergent - this is essentially the synthetic form of soap.  You can read the dictionary.com definition by clicking this link.  http://www.dictionary.reference.com/browse/detergent

Over the next few blog entries I will write about some of the more common fats and oils used to make soap and why they would be used.  I will also discuss some of the acids found in soap.  These acids are present in various degrees depending on the fat/oil used.  I urge you to read the labels on the soap you buy.  When I started to read them I started to have questions and noticed some patterns.

Citation:

1. Willcox, Michael (2000). "Soap". In Hilda Butler. Poucher's Perfumes, Cosmetics and Soaps (10th ed.). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. p. 453. ISBN 0-7514-0479-9. “The earliest recorded evidence of the production of soap-like materials dates back to around 2800 BCE in ancient Babylon.”