A bar of organic soap seems simple sitting in your hand, but it must do a lot – creamy lather that cleans while moisturizing, feels good and lasts well – all in one bar.
Real, pure Shea butter is handmade with incredible healing properties. Our partnership ensures it heals the lives who produce it while it heals our hands.
Many of you know we are avid gardeners and own an heirloom seed company, but you may not know we also have a small farm. Gardening or working with our horses, ducks, and pigs always leaves our hands and body dirty.
We’ve searched for a good, all around soap, but it didn’t seem to exist. All of the bars we tried – and we tried a bunch – either cleaned well while stripping all of the moisture from our hands or left an unsettling film after rinsing. Almost none lasted very long and we had just about given up hope of a non-chemical, non-commercial soap we could use and really enjoy.
Researching what goes into soap opened our eyes – especially commonly used ingredients and processes used to make it. We began to understand why most soaps irritated our skin, didn’t clean well or melted too quickly.
The more we learned, the more we knew we wanted a natural and organic soap – something made entirely from plant-based, unrefined ingredients.
When we found and tried this particular soap, we knew our search was a success. We use and love this soap daily, so it made sense to offer it to our customers!
Just like our seeds, we contract with a small family company to produce the absolute best soap possible. Join us as we explore what goes into a great bar of soap!
Unscented Soap
A bar of soap appears simple sitting in your hand, but it must balance and maximize its best qualities – creamy fluffy lather that cleans while moisturizing, feels good and lasts well – all in one bar.
This takes work – research, experimenting, and testing – to accomplish. A perfect bar soap is a result of carefully choosing and balancing the various ingredients to boost the bar’s hardness, lather quality, cleaning, and moisturizing ability. For example – moisturizing ingredients don’t contribute much to lather quality, and what makes great lather often dries our skin out.
All soap is made through a chemical reaction where part of an oil molecule attaches to a sodium ion from sodium hydroxide, commonly called lye. This is called saponification.
A properly produced soap consumes all of the lye during the saponification process, eliminating any chance of skin irritation. Superfatting assures that all lye is consumed. This process retains extra skin-nourishing oils in the finished soap. Superfatting won’t make your skin oily, it helps it to maintain natural moisture levels.
Lemongrass Tea Soap
The USDA’s National Organic Program (NOP) sets the standard for organic production. Soap falls under the “Made with Organic” section – Products made from a minimum of 70% organic content up to 95%. The USDA has set 70% as the minimum percentage a product can have and still use “organic” in its labels and marketing.
So, what does this mean for you?
Organic certification guarantees there are no synthetic fragrances, colors, or preservatives in the soap, as well as that all the oils and herbs were grown and processed according to organic standards (no pesticides, no radiation, and environmentally friendly methods).
To us, this means a soap whose ingredients are plant-based with no artificial substances such as synthetic fragrances, dyes, and preservatives. Our pure herbal soap is scented with essential oils and colored exclusively with organic herbs and plant extracts. 100% certified organic oils make up the soap base recipe.
We feel it’s worth the extra time and effort to meet organic standards and make truly organic products. Your skin will know the difference!
Gardener’s Hand Soap
Essential oils are concentrated plant extracts from the roots, bark, and plant leaves.
Fragrance oils are always synthetic, even though they have perfectly natural names and might contain natural ingredients.
Fragrances smell great initially but quickly overwhelm your nose once you get it home, then it’s not so nice or enjoyable.
Essential oils are less “pushy” up front but retain their appealing qualities throughout the life of the bar, never overwhelming your nose.
Peppermint Soap
Natural colors can be bright and lively, creating a beautiful bar of soap.
Some essential oils, like citrus oils, have their own color that can be just what certain soaps need.
The easiest way to add or control soap color is with herbs or clays. The desired colors are created near the end of the mixing process by adding herbs, clays or a combination.
Steeping herbs in oil create richer and more vivid colors.
Citrus Lavender Soap
Don’t be fooled by trendy or exotic ingredients on a label. If you don’t start with a well-formulated base, exotic ingredients won’t produce the soap you’re looking for. For example – palm kernel oil can be a great enhancement, but it can’t fix a poor formulation. Specialty ingredients are most commonly used as advertising hooks or as recipe magic in the hopes of creating a great soap from a poor-quality base. Glamorous ingredients or celebrity endorsements don’t produce extraordinary soap.
Lavender Soap
There’s virtue in products as natural as your skin. There are also practical benefits to using essential oils in skincare products.
Read labels carefully. If you see any variation or combination of the words fragrance, fragrance oil, or natural fragrance, don’t be fooled. There’s nothing natural about them.
Purchasing our handmade, organic soap gives you much more than just a great soap that leaves your skin clean. You support our small company and our soapmaker.
They, in turn, support growers for the ingredients of your bar of soap – ethical, sustainable and environmentally friendly methods that increase the soils over time and improves the communities where they are grown.
It turns out that a simple bar of soap can do some real good for many people!
The Shea tree – botanical name Butyrospermum parkii or Vitellaria paradoxa – grows in the dry Savannah belt of West Africa, stretching from Senegal in the west to Sudan in the east.
It has been an irreplaceable natural cosmetic pharmaceutical for people in Western Africa for millennia. Over the past few decades, it has become increasingly important in the skincare industries.
Most Americans know Shea butter as a highly touted skin care ingredient in a variety of soaps, lotions, balms, and butters.
Few realize the Shea advertised in the majority of cosmetic products in the US is nothing more than another highly refined food grade oil churned out of an industrial plant, regarded as just another commodity.
Pure hand-crafted Grade A Shea butter is a world apart from this!
Shea butter has been known as “women’s gold”for centuries for its light golden color but also because it’s historically been the work of women to harvest and produce Shea butter.
Millions of women across Western Africamake their own incomes and are improving their lives producing traditional Shea butter.
Women-owned and organized cooperatives harvest the ripe Shea fruits from wild growing Shea tree forests. Fermentation removes the fruit, then the nuts are sun-dried, crushed and lightly roasted, concentrating the Shea butter.
Finely ground Shea nut powder is mixed with warm water and constantly stirred until it thickens. Warm, liquid Shea oil is collected from the surface, then strained and slowly cooled to form Shea butter. After packaging it is sold at the local markets or exported.
It takes approximately 44 pounds of fresh Shea fruit to produce 3.3 pounds of pure Shea butter.
Shea Tree Flowers
Fair Trade certification is awarded after meeting certain standards, similar to organic certification. There are benefits and challenges, just like with the Certified Organic label.
This adds to the overall cost, but there are benefits most consumers never know about.
We – our supplier and ourselves – work as closely as possible with women’s cooperatives to keep the quality high, and also to pay them fairly.
Working directly with the cooperative and the Fair Trade organization, we eliminate as many profit-taking intermediate layers as possible while having a larger positive impact than we could by ourselves.
For example – currently, Shea nut harvesters earn 15 cents per pound and the women’s cooperative we work with want to pay the harvesters 25 cents per pound, only 10 cents more but a whopping 66% pay raise.
However, it isn’t as simple as just paying them more.
Regional and local politics, combined with existing laws, are making it difficult to simply give the harvesters a raise, so the Fair Trade organization is working with our women’s cooperative to change this.
A Shea nut harvester might earn $60/month, which allows her to live in a straw-thatched hut with no power in a communal village and walk up to a half mile for water at a common, communal well.
A 10 cent per pound pay raise will give her and her family a solid walled, roofed apartment with running water and a community generator for electricity.
Shea processors – who actually turn the nuts into Shea butter – make about $175/month, and the women’s cooperative is working to raise that to $225/month.
The additional income almost always paysfor schooling, whether it is getting all of their children into schools, or enrolling them in full-time private charter schools with a full curriculum.
Buying your Shea butter from a company engaged in direct, positive impact on the local producers gives your purchases a much larger effect simply because much more of each dollar makes it to those producers. This is exactly how one person makes a difference!
The standard commodity approach to Shea butter has so many layers – traders, intermediaries, transportation expenses, and investors – between the Shea butter producers and the US consumer that not even one penny of each dollar spent on a commercial Shea-labeled product reaches those in Africa.
According to The New York Times, a survey of a Burkina Faso village by USAID in 2010 found that every $1,000 of Shea nuts sold generated an additional $1,580 in economic benefits, such as reinvestments in other trades for the village. Shea butter exports from West Africa bring in between $90 million and $200 million a year, according to the article.
Much like the disproportionately large positive effects of spending your money at a Farmer’s Market instead of the grocery store, purchasing pure, unrefined Grade A Shea butter from a dedicated company partnering with a small producer ensures a better life for those making it.
Ethically sourced Shea butter heals our hands and skin while healing the lives and villages who make it.
Handmade Organic Soap
A bar of organic soap seems simple sitting in your hand, but it must do a lot – creamy lather that cleans while moisturizing, feels good and lasts well – all in one bar.
Shea Butter Heals Hands While Healing Lives
Real, pure Shea butter is handmade with incredible healing properties. Our partnership ensures it heals the lives who produce it while it heals our hands.