We love making soap! We love it so much that we created this whole page just to tell you how we do it. If you're interested, read on. If not, click here to skip right to the finished product.

What IS Soap?
Chemistry nerds, lend me your ears because we're about to get molecular on you.  In terms of chemistry, soap is a surfactant used with water for cleaning.  It adheres to both ambient nonpolar molecules like dirt or grease and polar molecules like water.  Here's the chemical formula for finished soap:
                                              CH₃-(CH₂)_n - COONa

Hydrocarbons break down oil and dirt while the ionic end of the equation makes soap water-soluble.

The Hot Process Method
Contrary to popular belief, this method was not named for our extraordinarily good-looking soapmaker. Instead, the "hot" in hot process literally refers to the heat used during production. We mix a bunch of fancy oils together with some lye and cook it in a bubbling cauldron during the full moon. Ok, so we lied -- we actually cook it pretty gently, just enough to trigger a little chemical reaction called saponification (sah-pon-if-ik-ay-shun). The concoction goes into a mold to cool, and voila! Soap is born.

Why on Earth would we use lye???
You may have heard the horror stories about Grandma's lye soap and its harsh cleansing properties. Two things you should know about lye:

1) Lye (sodium hydroxide) is used in all soapmaking, whether made in a cast-iron pot over a campfire, or mass-produced by a Fortune 500 conglomerate. You just can't make real soap without it. Anyone who tells you differently is wrong, plain and simple.

2) In Granny's time there was no way to accurately calculate the amount of lye needed to make soap. Bless Granny's heart, she eyeballed most of her ingredients (which were limited to wood ashes and either lard or beef tallow). As a result, her soap often had an excess of active lye in it, earning it the reputation of being an awful skin irritant. Fortunately, with advances in Lye Measuring 101, we no longer have to worry about this mess.

Storing your handcrafted soap
A word to the wise: handmade soap does not like standing water! For best results, store your soap in a dish that doesn't collect water. We prefer a wooden dish with ridges to let the soap dry after use.