Too Pretty To Use?

Hi everyone! This is Diana Wright from Bubbly Body Shoppe LLC. Welcome to my website! I am so excited to launch my new online store! We offer handmade artisan soap, and bath and body cosmetics to those who love to have skin loving ingredients in their soap & body cosmetics. Each month you can come back to this section to see what we have been up to and I’ll tell you what has been on my mind during this business journey I’m on. This month, I will be discussing our bar soaps and the comment I get the most often, “your soaps are too pretty to use!” Our bar soaps come in two different categories, glycerin and cold processed. Our glycerin soaps are made with a detergent free triple blend of shea butter, mango butter, and cocoa butter, and of course glycerin which adds moisturizing properties. These are the fancier soaps with the pretty tops or the novelty soaps that are made with molds to achieve cute little designs. My soap frosting is 100% soap. Not royal icing! A lot of people say these soaps are too pretty to use but I like to look at it this way…if you go to a wedding you will most likely see a beautiful wedding cake. The cake is so fancy and almost too pretty to eat. But soon after the reception starts the cake is cut and consumed by the wedding guests. If it wasn’t, all that hard work that went into the cake would be wasted and if left for too long it would not be eatable. Although not eatable, the same is true is true with soap. While it won’t necessarily spoil, we recommend using glycerin soap within three months of purchase because over time the oils and butters it is made with such as coconut oil and palm oil, can break down and lose their effectiveness. The fragrance oils that are used to scent the soap can also evaporate over time and the scent will lose its strength. While these soaps are still safe to use, they might not provide the benefits they were created to achieve. Cold process soaps are different in that they get better with age. By definition soap is made by mixing a fat or an oil with an alkali. The oils I use are made from plants, and the alkali that is used is lye, or sodium hydroxide. By blending and heating the oils and mixing them with the sodium hydroxide, a chemical reaction known as saponification occurs. Without the lye, you can’t achieve saponification. During saponification, the reaction between the lye and the other ingredients turns into soap, and the lye is no longer present. The soaps are then cut and put onto curing racks where they cure for several weeks to helps them harden into wonderful little skin loving cleansing bars. The longer the bar cures, the harder it gets. But we still recommend using these bars within a year because the harder they get, the drier they get and they can become brittle and their scent can fade over time. They are still perfectly safe to use when this happens, and will still get you clean. Most cold processed soaps have a shelf life of two years. But their properties are stronger within the first few months of production. So don’t miss out on bathing with these amazing soaps just because they are pretty, because they are also really good for your skin! The fancy designs make them great gifts for people or for your own personal enjoyment, or you can also use them as guest soaps! And if you’re worried about not having a pretty soap to look at while the others are being used for the purpose they were made for, check back with us and we can provide new designs that you can display in your bathroom while the others are being used. Once those have been displayed for a couple of months, start using those ones and come back for new fresh soaps to display! This way you can display beautiful soaps that represent all of the seasons, while using the soap from the previous season and benefitting from its skin loving properties. Thank you for supporting my online store and helping me make my small business dreams come true. Happy Holidays to all!