How To Shop For Hand-Made Soaps?:- Hand-made soaps or natural soaps are skin friendly and free from all those nasty toxic substances that our luxury and beauty bars from big brands try desperately to hide.
Nowadays there are a lot of scams about hand-made soaps. Commercial soaps are being labeled as hand-made and 100% natural. Their manufacturers simply buy a cheap soap base, melt it down and add a little essential oil to it and remake it to market it as a pricey hand-made soap. You do not have to be a part of this scam.
Handmade Soaps Versus Factory-Made Soaps
Handmade soaps are not only friendly to you and your delicate skin, they are friendly for the environment, for vegetarians and vegans. They are non-synthetic and free from artificial fragrances, petrochemicals or SLS. The organic, herbal and natural ingredients making up a bar of handmade soap are rich in minerals, vitamins and antioxidants which is all your skin needs to look fresh, young and revitalized.
Whether it is in a solid or liquid form Soap is an essential item for any household, used to wash hands, face, body or is handmade or factory made. The main purpose is to clean. However, the soaps have been classified on the basis of their textures, make or purpose for one simple reason: they are not the same!
All the soaps or cleaning agents have different chemicals properties. You would not use your liquid hand wash to wash your face. Would you? However, you can use a handmade soap to wash your hands, face or body but so can you with a factory made soap bar. So the first question that immediately comes to our minds is how natural soaps are different from the commercially made ones?
While commercially made soaps are so abundantly and cheaply available in the supermarkets, they are nowhere close to the 'real' handmade soaps. Yes, they may be more colorful, have attractive fragrances, be very long lasting, have better shapes and sizes and less expensive to buy, they are certainly not good for you and your lovely skin. In fact, they are not even fit into the definition of 'soap'. That is why they are labeled as beauty bars or given other names on the packaging. A handmade soap is a real soap with good, honest and simple ingredients.
Ever wondered why commercially made soaps are cheaper than the natural ones? That is because they are produced in bulk and contain cheap chemicals and artificial ingredients which are not even good for your skin. Natural soaps, on the other hand use pure and expensive natural ingredients such as honey in our 'Honeycomb' soap bar or coconut milk in our 'Coconut milk' bath to keep your skin soft, beautiful and naturally hydrated.
Handmade soap bars are made out of pure ingredients that come from nature. They contain essential and natural oils such as sweet almond oil, olive oil and tea tree oil and other natural ingredients and extracts that have been used since ancient times to achieve a clean and beautiful skin. There are no other harsh chemicals or preservatives or other additives used to give color, fragrance or life to the soap. Factory made soaps actually use chemicals such as carcinogenic parabens, sodium lauryl sulphate (SLS) and other chemicals which over dry, irritate or harm the skin. While natural soaps make use of glycerin to keep your skin soft and moisturized, the soaps that fill supermarket shelves make use of cheap oils such as palm, soy, vegetable or even animal fat!
While commercially made soap looks attractive is cheaper to buy, it is not a real soap. It contains harmful chemicals, cheap oils and additives which damage the skin.
A natural handmade soap, on the other hand, is a better, more reliable and healthier product that is completely natural.
Below are some tips to help you make a wise choice while buying a natural, hand-made soap.
1) Credibility Of The Manufacturer
This point should always be carefully researched and checked whenever you are about to buy any product, especially products that you eat or use on yourself. Hand-made soaps are no exception. Whenever you go to buy a bar of natural soap make sure to check that the manufacturer has listed proper contact details and nothing on the label suggests that the soap is made by someone sitting at the bottom of the ocean.
The labels should also mention proper manufacturing and expiry dates as well as distributor's details.
2) Ingredients
Always carefully scan the ingredients mentioned on the label. If the soap mentions any chemicals like Sodium palmetate, discard it at once, since it is definitely not a natural soap. Make sure that the oils listed are not in chemical names since this also indicates that the oils were “fractioned” and had most of their fatty oils, which are beneficial to the skin, removed.
A good hand-made soap will be super-fatted. In this process the lye (which all soaps are made using it and excess lye causes a very strong caustic reaction on the skin) is converted to soap using lots of beneficial oils and not just that, some oils are left in excess within the soap to provide your skin with benefits that a manufactured bar would never be capable of.
A quality hand-made soap will promise to give you either one or more of the essential vitamins A, D, E, K, and F.
3) Price
A good quality hand-made soap will never be cheap. Good natural products cost money and hence a natural soap will come with a slightly heavier price tag as compared to commercial soaps. If you find a hand-made soap for a dirt cheap price, beware! It is either a scam or made using poor quality materials. The only exception is when quality hand-made soaps are on sale such as a clearance sale.
4) Shape And Color
Just because it looks really beautiful and intricate does not make it a quality hand-made soap. Intricate shapes and features in a soap bar can only be created by either a factory or by a very, very skilled soap maker. The second option is quite the rarity so it is suggested to avoid all those fancy looking soap bars. Hand- made soaps will have a rustic shape and feel to it.
Make sure that the soap bar is not transparent. Transparent soaps are always manufactured and never natural soaps.
SUPRAJA
