What it Takes to Make a Luxury Soap Bar

Mint and Rosemary Soap Bar made with rosemary hydrosol, colored with French Green Clay, scented with peppermint and rosemary essential oil, and topped with garden grown chamomile

Soap is deemed a necessity for hygiene, but when comparing liquid to bars, liquid soap seems to be more popular in today’s age. There is something to be said about utilizing a simple solid bar of soap, a tradition that dates back to the 17th-century. Bar soap is a gift from nature, a tangible object that creates a transformative connection with self through tender massages and intentional strokes across the body. It offers a sense of renew and rebirth that only a luxurious bar of soap can perform.

Here at Studio Mestiza, we have an affinity for honoring traditional and artisanal crafts. In order to understand how a soap bar is deemed “luxurious” we must go back to the basics. The most simple and basic bar of soap is made with water, sodium hydroxide (lye), and oil. Back in the day the making of lye alone was a whole day’s work as people would have to use water to leach wood ash over an open flame to extract potassium hydroxide (KOH) from the ashes. The remaining caustic solution was then combined with oils and fats suchs as tallow, a rendered animal fat, to saponify it and turn it into a bar of soap. The resulting bar of soap is left to cure for four to six weeks to allow the water to evaporate out completely creating a solid, concentrated, caustic-free, long lasting soap bar that became a staple in every household.

Lavender Fields Soap Bar made with lavender hydrosol, colored with Brazilian purple clay, scented with lavender essential oil, and topped with garden grown lavender

Nowadays, we have the ease of combining sodium hydroxide (NaOH) with water and/ or a liquid in the water phase to create a lye solution and combine it with our prefered plant seed oils in as little as one hour.

At Studio Mestiza, our process of making soap starts months ahead, planting medicinal herbs and botanicals in the garden from seed to be able to have a sufficient harvest for oil infusions. By infusing plant seeds oils, such as Olive Seed Oil, with medicinal herbs, such as Calendula flowers, it allows for the oil to extract all the skin loving benefits Calendula offers into the oil itself creating a highly potent “liquid gold.”

Our soap bar recipe usually calls for three to four different plant seed oils such as olive oil for gentleness, coconut oil for cleansing, shea butter for moisturizing, and sunflower oil for vitamin E. Each oil plays an important part in how it interacts with our skin barrier function and what the end purpose is. Take a 100% coconut oil soap bar for example. Coconut oil in soap creates an extremely solid bar with the function to cleanse which makes for an excelent dish soap; Try using it for your body, and your skin will feel dried out and stripped away of moisture.

The importance of formulating a balanced soap bar often gets overlooked when companies try to keep costs down and utilize the cheapest oils on the market. If you have the luxury to choose where to get your soap from, we suggest supporting farmers and small businesses. It’s most likely your local farmer has access to fresh ingredients grown on their property such as a goat farm producing their own goat milk soap or an olive grove farm producing their own castile or olive oil soap.

The quality speaks for itself when getting to know the fresh ingredients farmers grow and utilize, because if you can’t eat the ingredients then why should we put them on our bodies.

That’s not to say we should be eating soap… please don’t eat the soap!! The mentality of selecting soap should be the same mentality of selecting consumables and food we bring into our home.

With three to four different plant seed oils included in our soap formulation, at least one of the oils contains our medicinal plant infusions; An alchemy that takes both time and patience to macerate and infuse for the richest oils possible.

Calendula oil infusion strained after 8 weeks

The process of making soap is a true scientific formulation as we ensure complete saponification is achieved in order to have a successful bar of usable soap. In cold process soap making, there is a term called superfat. This involves an extra amount of leftover oils in the soap bar, or more oil than is needed for complete saponification, in order to intentionally offer extra nourishing and moisturizing benefits. All of our soap bar recipes come with a 5% - 8% superfat level to act as an emolient and leave skin softened and soothed after washing.

Our water phase isn’t just made up of water but skin nourishing hydrosols (floral waters), and additives such as honey, pumpkin puree, or goat milk depending on the recipe. The majority of the water phase in our soap bars are made up of hydrosols we distill ourselves adding an even more comprehensive handmade touch to the mix.

After the water and oil phase have been blended together with an immersion stick blender and the oils have saponified, we then have fun with the artistic side of soap making by adding colors, scents, and decorative topers. We do our best to keep things as natural as possible by only using clay or plant roots to color our soap, essential oils directly extracted from plants, and botanicals from the garden as decoration. Essential oils are the big spender in our recipes as they tend to be more costly than lab formulated fragrances but are worth the high cost for the medicinal consituents residing in each drop. Not only do they transform soap into a divine smelling bouquet of flowers, but they add soothing properties that can help support troubled or aging skin. Afterall, our skin is the largest organ of our body protecting our insides from the outside world; Cleansing it with nourishing oils and plant extracts is a way of saying thank you.

Lavender Cocoa soap bars with moisturizing cacao seed butter, cocoa powder, lavender hydrosol and lavender essential oil