Is all handmade soap created equal?

Is all handmade soap created equal?

Have you ever bought a bar of handmade soap from a brand thinking it will be just as good or the same as a bar from another brand? Have you ever used a new bar that had the SAME ingredients as your favorite bar and wondered why they don’t feel or lather the same? There is a reason!

As a refresher, soap is created by the chemical reaction of the combination of oils, butters & fats with an alkali (in most cases, sodium hydroxide, aka lye). While it’s possible for a soap maker to use literally thousands of combinations of oils, the far majority of soaps contain some combination of coconut, olive, sunflower, tallow, palm & castor oils simply because they are readily available and cost-effective. They also have fatty acid profiles that contribute to a quality bar of soap. More on this in a future blog post.

For purposes of this discussion, let’s focus on a soap that contains a few of these ingredients. Several very popular brands use the following combination of oils/butters:

1. Olive Oil
2. Coconut Oil
3. Shea Butter
4. Palm Oil
5. Castor Oil

Note: Per labeling requirements in the US, ingredients (if listed) should be listed in relative order with the ingredients in decreasing order. In my example above, olive oil would be present in the soap in the highest percentage. 

But, a soap maker can create a soap using these exact ingredients but using them in different percentages. For example, two brands may use “recipes” like these:

Each contains the same oils, just in difference ratios. Is the soap the same? Absolutely not.

Before I talk about the chemistry of why they are different, let’s use an easy to understand analogy. Imagine you are making spaghetti sauce.  The ingredients in the sauce recipe are: tomatoes, garlic, onions, olive oil & basil. 

Let’s compare your great-grandma’s recipe, which is the best you’ve ever tasted and a grocery store jar with the same ingredients. You heat it up the grocery store jar and discover it is NOTHING like grandma’s sauce. It reeks of garlic and onions and makes you gag.

It’s the same concept as above in the soap example. Same ingredients, different ratios. It’s a little more complicated with soap, but that’s the basic concept. 

Every oil used in soap making has a unique fatty acid profile which is basically a set of characteristics that contribute to the overall quality of the soap. Some oils contribute to a harder bar, some oils contribute to a more creamy bar, some to cleansing properties. 

When crafting a recipe, most knowledgable soap makers use a soap “calculator”. The calculator analyzes the specific fatty acid profile of each oil in the recipe and calculates a “score” in several quality categories such as Hardness, Cleansing, Conditioning, Bubbly & Creamy. Using the percentages above, here are the scores in each category:

You can see how the difference in oil ratios changes the qualities of the soap and why even bars with the same basic ingredients can be very different. Is one bar better than the other? Perhaps. Most soap calculators have a suggested “range” for each value. Without going into details, the cleansing value for the Brand B soap is very high and outside the recommended range. Will the soap hurt you? No, but you may find it drying to your skin. 

As I mentioned, there are literally thousands of oil combinations a soap maker can choose to use. I hope this sheds some light on how those choices impact the quality of the bar.

As always, I hope I’ve provided some insight & education!

Dianne