marigoldsoap's Profile

Bio

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ABOUT MARIGOLD

First item listed: April 17, 2008

For five years, until January 2008, I was half of Loth & Volta (lothandvolta.etsy.com). We'd have gone on happily in partnership, but my husband got a job in upstate NY, and we had to bid farewell to Philadelphia, and Lisa and I had to break up the band.

I gave birth to a beautiful, wonderful, frowny and fussy and delicious baby boy on May 31st, so I'm pretty much up to my neck in baby-wrangling. Please bear with me. I'm restarting production now, but it will take a while for me to reach pre-baby levels of productivity.

ABOUT ALL-NATURAL

Natural does not mean safe. I am very careful when formulating to use only skin-friendly ingredients.

Many bath & body products claim to be "natural," but there's no clear, universally agreed-upon definition of the word when it comes to labeling, so consumers should be attentive. Here are some basic things to watch for:

- Ingredients. Does the product have a full ingredients list, including colorants? If not, view any "natural" claims with skepticism.
- Fragrance. "Fragrance" in an ingredients list means fragrance oil, which is synthetic, and usually petroleum-based. A natural product will be scented with essential oils, not synthetic fragrances.
- Vegan. Total absence of animal products does not make a product natural. It could be packed with synthetics and still be vegan.
- Color. A bright, crayon-y color generally cannot be achieved naturally. Natural colorants like clays and ground plant matter tend to produce earthy, muted colors.

Just as natural doesn't mean safe, synthetic doesn't mean dangerous. I choose to work all-natural because that is my personal preference, but I recognize that many synthetic ingredients are perfectly harmless or beneficial, though they generally do have a greater environmental impact. As a consumer, I am far more concerned with the conscientiousness, experience, and knowledge of the producer than with whether she uses exclusively natural ingredients.

SOME DEFINITIONS

superfatting. sometimes referred to as "lye discount." This is the practice most soapmakers employ to ensure a mild, non-drying soap: we figure the amount of lye needed to saponify all the fat in a recipe, and then reduce the lye (usually by between 2-8%) so that there is free fat in the soap. The higher the lye discount, the milder the soap will be, but (generally) the softer it will be, and the more likely it will be to develop rancidity. Often soapmakers will add their superfatting oils as late in the process as possible, so that nicer (and more expensive) oils are the ones left whole in the soap.

rebatching. also sometimes called hand-milling or remilling -- but this is a little misleading, as "milled" soaps are by definition factory-produced. This is the process by which a soapmaker takes plain soap, grates or chops it up, melts it slowly over low heat (I do it in a crock pot, but there are many methods), and finally adds ingredients just before mixing and packing into a mold. I rebatch because it allows me to add ingredients like vitamin e or aloe vera gel that are too fragile to survive the heat and chemical reaction of saponification. I tend to rebatch only face soaps -- the ones in which I use the most and the most expensive additives.

Female, Born on February 7

Favorite Materials

olive oil, shea butter, avocado oil, calendula, honey, black pepper essential oil, rose otto