EARTH-FRIENDLY SOAPS!
Reading Vista Magazine http://www.vistamagonline.com/ again…..Hey! Our Favorite Thing! Good Soap! Seems like a no-brainer…but it’s as difficult to find a good soap as it is to find a good loaf of white bread (try True Grain in Cowichan Bay)http://www.truegrain.ca/.
“Much of what goes down our drains winds up in the environment,” reminds Michail Bloch in his article. So…how about dumping those fragrances and chemicals that harm the environment? Most of all, the “antibacterial” products that are ubiquitous today.
Bloch says, “antibacterial soaps contain MIT (methylisothiazolinone), (want to use this?????). Studies have shown it is allergenic, cytotoxic and linked to nerve cell death. The most common antibacterial Triclosan….is actually registered as a pesticide…and believed to destroy fragile aquatic ecosystems, (like where the frogs USED to live?)
“Other ingredients found in soap,” he says “are paraffin wax, ozokerite, other crude oil derivatives and animal tallow. This is just scratching the surface, ” Bloch continues…and reading a personal care label is like a chemistry lesson.” He also mentions, as I frequently do, that at the end of the soapmaking process they (those other guys) extract the glycerine, a useful emollient, and sell it separately as a moisturizer. Ours of course, stays right in the soap.
So, What should you use?? How about OUR SOAPS!!! Yippee! A nice, healthy, handmade alternative to the above. How about palm, coconut and olive oils. Lately, palm has gotten a bad rap also, but upon investigating..it seems the bad press may be generated by a rival company who has switched to much less expensive canola…formerly known as rapeseed. And GMO, too. Anytime you grow anything on a large scale, there are environmental consequences…but palm sure beats supporting the beef industry by using it’s by-product, tallow.
Then, there is shea butter, and lots of other good and great things we add to our soap bars. Most importantly, our soaps are not melt and pour, we actually make them from ‘scratch’ using the old tried-and-true ‘cold-process’ method used by European soapmakers for centuries to make the best soaps in the world……
And you can still find those handcrafted Artisan Pure Soaps at Saltspring Soapworks,http://saltspringsoapworks.com/products/handmade-soap/ right here on the rock…or, if you don’t live on this little island, we do ship all over the world! Don’t let another day go by using something that looks like soap, but morphed into a detbar (read detergent bar) decades ago.
Linda Quiring
Founder
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