ReNe: soap saga

Recently, I've been trying my hand at mixing my own skincare toiletries, as in, acquiring some base ingredients and putting them together.

It started last year, when I first noticed that some brands of organic toiletries sold in North America (soap, shampoo) are not expensive. I've never bought organic toiletries in Singapore because since organic stuff is all so expensive and I'm not rich, I'd spend money on the organic stuff that I actually ingest.

Then I read about sodium lauryl sulphate, a very common surfactant found in commercial toiletries. It's widely used because it's cheap and also because it's a good degreaser and foaming agent. Unfortunately, the degreasing properties also means that SLS is very drying on the skin. A look at the material safety data sheet shows that it is an irritant and a possible carcinogen.

MANUFACTURERS MATERIAL SAFETY DATA SHEET ON SODIUM LAURYL SULPHATE

Health Hazard Acute And Chronic:

ACUTE: CAUSES MILD IRRITATION ON CONTACT WITH SKIN, EYES OR MUCOUS MEMBRANES. SKIN CONTACT COULD CAUSE IRRITATION OR ALLERGIC REACTION. MODERATELY TOXIC BY INGESTION.

CHRONIC: TESTS ON LAB ANIMALS INDICATE MATERIAL MAY CAUSE MUTAGENIC EFFECTS

So, I thought, how to avoid it? Well, I could just buy the organic stuff, though not all avoid the use of SLS. Often, they use some derivative such as sodium laureth sulfate (SLES), which are not very much better. Or I could mix my own. The latter appealed to the chemist in me. (Yes, I've not stepped into a chemistry lab for almost a decade, but once in a while, I still like to muck around with liquids.)

The first soap I got was castile soap, which is just a really simple soap made from olive oil and sodium hydroxide. It's an all-purpose cleaner, grease-cutter, and disinfectant; in fact, such soaps were the original cleaners, before detergents were invented (though to be precise, animal fat-based soaps came before vegetable-based soaps). Apparently it can be used straight out of the bottle as a cleanser (since it came as a thin liquid), but I found it too drying on my skin, probably because my skin's naturally dry. So I started reading up a bit more.

Backtracking a bit towards the basics:
Although we generally refer to skin cleaning products when we say soap, and house cleaning products when we say detergents, strictly speaking, soap is a salt of a fatty acid, and is made through a saponification reaction between a fat and a strong base, or alkali. The fat can be animal fat or a vegetable oil (which would give castile soap its name), and the alkai is usually sodium hydroxide (also known as lye), potassium hydroxide (potash) or sodium cabonate (soda ash). In saponification, the alkali hydrolyzes the fat and converts the fatty acids to glycerol (also known as glycerin) and soap, which is the fatty acid salt.

However, many of the cleansing products we use today are technically not soaps but detergents, which are defined loosely as a compound, or a mixture of compounds, intended to assist cleaning. In other words, it's encompasses the wide range of cleaning agents that are not soaps. Soap cleans by acting as an emulsifier, i.e. it allows oil and water to mix so that oily grime can be removed during rinsing. Detergents are primarily surfactants, which lower the surface tension of water so that it (water) is less likely to stick to itself and more likely to interact with oil and grease.

So what are the problems associated with current commercial skincare cleaners today? For one, some are not technically even 'soaps', but detergents, which are harsher. A look at the ingredient list of most shower gels/creams shows that a major ingredient is SLS, or its cousins, and this is the detergent because this is the degreaser at work in the cleaner. Even for 'real' bar soaps, most commercial bar soap manufacturers take out the glycerin that is (always) produced during the saponification process, and replace it with a lesser-quality chemical moisturizer. Why? Because glycerin is a humectant, i.e. it is the moisturizer component of the soap, and apparently it is valuable. Companies remove glycerin because they can sell the glycerin for use in other products. A look at moisturizers often show glycerin listed as one of the major ingredient; in a tube I'm holding, glycerin comes right after water!

Sounds ridiculous right? To remove the moisturizing component of the soap, replace with a lesser quality moisturizer, and then because the soap now becomes too drying, sell you a separate moisturizer, which incidentally contains the glycerin from that soap. Even without going into other controversial problems with many commercial soaps such as artificial fragrance, dyes, triclosan (anti-bacterial agent), already there is a strong case for making or at least mixing your own soaps.

(Apparently, a lot of people do MAKE their own soap. You can buy lye, as sodium hydroxide is known to soap-makers, and add it to your own choice of vegetable oil, but the process apparently requires some precautions. Like proper ventilation. Duh. Heating sodium hydroxide over your kitchen stove does come with its hazards. But if I know where to buy sodium hydroxide, I may try it... I did it once before in secondary school.)

Having read all that, the next logical step, for my dry skin that is, would be to add some moisturizing component to the castile soap, such as glycerin and/or oils. Luckily, I happened to also discover an organic shop nearby called Grass Roots that sells in bulk many common cleaning agents, including glycerin. Nice. I bought some (it's not expensive) and added it to the castile soap. (The castile soap already has glycerin, by the way, retained from the saponifiation process; I just wanted more.) It worked; the soap is now more moisturizing. I also added a bit of glycerin to our non-organic (detergent) hand-soap, thinking more moisture is always good. Because when I was playing around with all these, it was winter and my skin was feeling *really* dry.

I experimented with various ratios of soap and glycerin. A good ratio for optimal foaming seems to be about 30-40% glycerin, the rest castile soap, but this mixture is still a little too drying for me. 50% glycerin and 50% soap works nicely and I can live with the lowered foaming qualities. Then I tried adding some sesame oil (because I read a bit about super-fatting soaps) but that really killed the bubbles. I'm also experimenting with another organic soap I bought from Grass Roots. However, because after I mix up a small batch, I'd have to test (and use that lot up) over the next few days, so the trials are moving along slowly.

So, is it cheap(er)? Compared to buying the high-end skincare (organic or non-organic), yeah. Buying all these stuff in bulk is comparable to buying the cheap skincare stuff. However, as the liquid castile soap and glycerin are very, very liquid, I go through them relatively quickly. Overall, I think it's still quite cheap. As I mentioned, I'm trying another brand of organic liquid soap -- it's more viscous (easier to use) and much cheaper.

The other big problem I have as well is with the scents; till now, I've not been able to settle on a pleasing scent. I guess I could leave the soap 'scentless', but while the fragrance-free organic soaps do not smell disagreeable, pure glycerin smells a little weird. More about scent mixing in a later post.