How is soap made?

The big soap makers make soap in gigantic factories - they use a lot of chemicals and a lot of huge machines to mix chemicals, and extract the good stuff, like glycerin, so they can sell that off separately. They make it in huge batches so they can sell it really cheap. It can be very drying because they remove a lot of the natural moisturizing components to make other products with. Lots of companies use petroleum products as part of the base oils. The resulting products are really more like a detergent than a soap and can leave your skin dry, itchy and flaky. These are the brand name soaps that most of us grew up with.

Those of us who grew up in rural areas may remember a grandmother or aunt that made old fashioned lye soap. They weren't too careful about either the quantity or quality of the ingredients so some of this soap could often be really harsh and smelly. They often made their own lye from wood ashes and added this to whatever animal fat they had left over from cooking and rendering the meat that went on the table. It could be wonderful or it could be nasty. I remember it both ways.

Soapmakers who make soap by hand today have much better ingredients; highly refined vegetable oils and butters from all over the world, pure filtered animal fats, high grade and virtually pure sodium hydroxide (lye), and well developed procedures and measurements to determine the exact amount of chemicals needed to turn any given combination of oils into gentle and natural soap.

Handmade soap is, for the most part, made in one of three ways. There is Melt and Pour - which is really just buying glycerin soap and remelting it to put into your own molds after you add some coloring and some fragrance. This is the easiest method and is how many people get started making soap. It is easy and fun for kids to do. If you buy a soap that is transparent or translucent, or if it is being sold as a "Pure Glycerin" soap, it is a melt and pour soap of some sort. If the soap contains sodium tallowate, it is also a melt and pour soap using a commercially produced soap base made from animal fat.

The other methods of making soap are Cold Process and Hot Process. Both require the use of Sodium Hydroxide (Lye) which converts the fats and oils to a type of salt we know as soap through the chemical process of saponification. Precise measurement of ingredients assures that all of the lye gets converted to soap while leaving some small percentage of the oils still in the soap as moisturizers. The chemical process of saponification also creates glycerin and any handmade soap will have a lot of this present in the soap. All of the Smell Like A Monkey soaps are made with the cold process method.

Hot Process soaps start out as Cold Process soap, but then are cooked for an additional length of time to hasten the saponification process. Hot Process soap can be used immediately while Cold Process soap has to cure for 2 to 4 weeks to complete the process of saponification. All Smell Like A Monkey soaps are fully cured and PH tested before they are sold.

Handmade soap can be made in an infinite array of colors, shapes, and sizes with an infinite combination of oils, fragrances, moisturizers, and botanical exfoliants that help scrub off old skin cells and also add color, texture and interest to the soap. Once you try a bar of our soap, you may never go back to factory made soap again. Smell Like A Monkey soap is made in small batches, poured into molds, cut into bars by hand and cured before being offered for sale.

If you are out there buying handmade soap make sure you read the ingredients. If sodium tallowate or glycerin are the first listed ingredients then what you are buying is commercially produced soap that has been remelted, combined with some new ingredients, colors and scents and is being sold as handmade. Some of these soap makers may imply that lye was not used but that is never true. Glycerin soap and sodium tallowate soap were both manufactured using lye. There is no way around that. It is the only process that has been discovered to make soap. You probably will pay a lot less for these soaps than you will pay for genuine hot process or cold process soaps made from scratch. You may find that you like them - but the ingredients and the processes are far different than we use at Smell Like A Monkey. Our soap costs a little more, but it is an affordable luxury!