Frequently Asked Questions

Q. Why include goat milk?
A. Goat milk is rich in vitamins, minerals, electrolytes, trace elements, enzymes, protein, and fatty acids. It contributes to a soap that is rich, creamy, and moisturizing, to soften and nurture your skin.

Q. Are all goat milk soaps the same?

A. No. Soap can be made with water to which a little goat milk powder or canned liquid goat milk has been added, and still be called goat milk soap. We use only whole, farm-fresh, undiluted goat milk, with absolutely no water added. Each full-size bar contains over a full ounce of goat milk. Also, to minimize damaging the beneficial properties of the goat milk, we produce our soaps using a special Cold Process so the milk is never heated or scorched. Unlike Hot Process soaps which can be sold immediately, ours must first be cured for a month before sale. It takes longer, but we want to make the best soap, for our family and yours.

Q. Are all handmade soaps the same?

A. No. Besides whether the soap is made with goat milk or just water, and whether hot process or cold, different oils add different properties. Select oils and combinations enhance the soap’s skin nurturing properties, benefitting from the unique characteristics each adds. And while some handmade soaps include animal fats (lard), we make ours with only plant oils. Finally, our soap includes lots of food grade olive oil. Olive oil is expensive and lengthens the cure time required, but the additional skin benefits are worth it. See Ingredients for a full description of the benefits each oil adds.

Q. Why not just buy cheaper soaps at the grocery store?

A. Cheap ‘soaps’ usually aren’t even real soap. They are surfactants, which are drying to your skin because they strip away all your natural oils. Read the label and see all the chemicals listed. Even the lather is produced with a chemical. Not so with our goat milk soap, which lathers because of the oils used, and is actually moisturizing instead of drying.

Q. How long does a bar last?

A. We joking say that depends on how often you bathe. Actually, our customers are surprised by how long our bars last compared to others they’ve used. Expect 2-3 weeks for daily showering, longer in the tub if not left in the water. The soap last longest if allowed to drain well and dry between uses.

Q. Is sodium hydroxide used in making your soap?

A. Yes, bar soap can’t be made without it. In a properly formulated soap, it is all used up when it reacts with and changes the oils to soap (saponification), so there isn’t any left. A slight excess of oils is used to assure this, as well as to provide additional skin benefits. Bernie, a degreed chemist, calculates our formulations to assure this, and for precision we weigh our ingredients by the gram. Also, we only use food grade sodium hydroxide. Technical grade costs less, but may contain heavy metal impurities.

Q. How do you color your soaps?

A. We don’t color all of them, but for those we do, we use purified natural minerals: iron oxides and ultramarines. Soap with fragrances that contain vanilla will darken to a brown during curing, with no other coloring agent needed. We don’t use chromium oxide or chromium hydroxide for greens. Even though our bodies need trace amounts of chromium, it is considered a toxic metal, and in fact has been used to preserve wood exposed to ground contact. In Europe, its use in soaps is banned.

Q. What do you scent your soaps with?

A. There are two ways to produce scents: essential oils, and fragrance oils. Essential oils are natural, and are extracted from plant materials. The variety of scents which can be produced this way is very limited, and many essential oils are not skin-safe. Not everything natural is good for us: think poison ivy! Therefore, we also use fragrance oils, which are manufactured and are certified as skin safe when used in the proper amount. We select only those which are phthalate and paraben free.