This is a question I receive frequently from new customers. People are often surprised, and maybe a little disappointed, when they use a handmade soap for the first time and find that the lather is not as robust as they are used to with their commercial bar. I will commonly have customers, who are looking to use our soap for the first time, ask what they can expect from our lather.
I want to start off by saying that there is a good reason why handmade soaps often do not lather as strongly as their commercial counterparts. Commercial soaps frequently contain sulfates. Sulfates are used as a foaming agent that helps the soap to quickly develop a thick lather. There are countless articles out there that debate the use of sulfates, whether they are safe for you or the environment. Whether or not you believe that they are “safe” there is a decent amount of evidence that shows that sulfates can cause skin irritation.
The important thing to remember is that the lather itself does not get your skin clean. We have been conditioned to believe that a thick lather is necessary for the soap to do it’s job… It’s not. So why include an ingredient that is not necessary and is potentially harmful?
With that said, what about our lather? We understand that our customers want lather, so when we were developing our recipe we designed a mixture of oils that promotes a more robust lather than is often found in homemade soaps. We do this naturally just with the percentage of a few key oils within our soap.
So, what’s our lather like? For most of our soap line it is full, silky, and bubbly. It gives you the experiences that you are looking for and leaves your skin feeling soft and clean. The lather of our Castile Goat Milk Soap and our Cedarwood Goat Milk Soap is more lotion-like. It’s slick and full, making it a perfect soap for shaving. Finally there is our Rosewood Salt Goat Milk Soap. The lather for this particular soap is a little thinner than the others, because of the salt, but it still bubbles up nicely.
We put a lot of effort and research into naturally getting the perfect lather for our soaps. Give it a try! You won’t be disappointed!