It’s been an interesting time for our Castile Goat Milk Soap. This little unassuming soap tended to get ignored at the farmers markets. Customers would come up to our booth asking for a mild soap that was good for sensitive skin and then get a bit of a wondering eye… or nose rather… when they start smelling all of our other fantastic soaps that contain scents. Our Peppermint Eucalyptus Goat Milk Soap tended to steal the attention from most of the other soaps. I get it… the Peppermint Eucalyptus is my favorite as well, but if you have extremely sensitive skin our Castile is probably a better fit. It may be unscented but it’s an outstanding bar of soap and it has really come into its own over the last few years as customers have had to read the descriptions on our website and make decisions based on their needs rather than their noses.
Our Castile Goat Milk Soap is actually the first bar of soap we made for our business. It seemed like an easy place to start, a relatively simple recipe to design. However when you are dealing with chemistry nothing is easy. Little changes make a big difference in the final outcome of the soap. So it took us months to feel like we had a recipe that we really loved.
Traditionally Castile is a soap that is made of a single vegetable oil, like olive oil. Most of the soaps you find on the shelves are not traditional Castile (y’all all know who I’m talking about), but a bar of soap made only of a single oil is not a well rounded bar of soap and doesn’t give you the best results. When we started to develop our Castile we set out to create an unscented goat milk soap bar that would be good for customers with sensitive skin. We knew while a single oil, olive oil, would get us close we needed to round out the bar with something a little extra.
Olive oil creates a wonderful soft, lotion-like, lather but lacks the bubbles that people expect from soap. It can also make a soap that is very soft, so soft that it will wash away too quickly. To combat both of these problems we added a little coconut oil to the recipe to give the soap a more bubbly lather and palm oil to add more structure to the bar; to make it harder and last longer. We played with this recipe for months. The olive oil needed to be the star (aside from the goat milk, olive oil is really the star in all of our bars) so we needed to find the right balance. I strongly believe that we we landed on the perfect balance!
In the end this bar came out exactly how we wanted. It’s soft, gentle, and so luxurious that you don’t feel like you are missing out by not going with one of our scented varieties. So those of you with sensitive skin, consider adding our Castile Goat Milk Soap to your shower.