What do you look for in vegan soap?

Hello, Ledboots!

That's exactly the information I'm looking for. There are so many choices of soaps out there, but not many store-bought brands meet strict vegan requirements, so it's great to know what benefits people care more about and what features people care less about. It sounds like you're looking for a plant-based soap that's good on your skin and smells good but doesn't break the bank, and if it's palm-free, that's a nice bonus. I can agree with that. It's important to have a soap that's enjoyable to use but doesn't violate your beliefs and doesn't cost a ton. It's also good that you mentioned your preference for liquid soaps. I've found that liquid soap is incredibly time-consuming and messy to make, so even though I used to make and sell it, I've stopped. It was just never worth the money, so now I just focus on bars.

Thank you so much for your thoughtful answer, Ledboots. It really helps a lot.

Steven

Hi, Silva.

Truthfully, I like Dr. Bronners also. I don't like that it's made with palm oil, which has debatable environmental consequences, and I've heard that mine is more moisturizing. I also don't like that they call their soap "magic." But that's a different topic. Anyway, it's a decent soap and a good choice in general.

Yes, pricing has been difficult. Since I mainly sell online, that means I have to account for shipping costs. The two methods I've tried are:

1) Every product is $5.00, and shipping is a flat $5.00 for the entire order.
2) Every product is $6.50, and shipping is free if you buy 2 or more items.

I think either of those prices is competitive for handmade soap, but it's tough when you're competing with mass-produced machine made soaps selling for less than $4.00.

As for what I sell, it's only bar soap. I have 5 varieties:
1) Unscented
2) Cedarwood
3) Lavender
4) Peppermint
5) Lemon-Lime.

There are a lot of flavors that I won't make because I've committed to only scenting with essential oils. Many popular flavors, coconut for instance, only come in a more artificial fragrant oil, which I won't use.

So that's where I am on pricing and variety. How does that strike you? What important flavors am I missing, or what products would you like to see? And do you think that my pricing is fair? I'm looking for brutal honesty here. Tear up my whole business model if you see fit. I'm here to learn some lessons.

Thank you for your comments!

Steven

My vegan soap priorities:

1. Unscented
2. Lots of lather
3. No palm oil
4. Organic
5. Bar soap preferences
* Medium-sized bar: The 8 oz. "Kiss My Face" bar is too big. A 2 oz. bar is too small.
* Doesn't disintegrate into goo. Some olive oil soaps do this
* Packaging: Recyclable. Paper or paperboard only. No plastic
6. Liquid soap preferences
* Concentrated, not weak
* Bottle: Made from high percentage of post-consumer recycled plastic. Recyclable: #1 (PETE) or #2 (HDPE) plastics only.

Price: I prefer to pay no more than $2 for a 4 oz. bar, or $12 for a 32 oz. bottle.

Favorite past brands of mine:
1. Dr. Bronner's 32 oz. liquid soap, peppermint or unscented
2. Kirk's Castile Soap, bar

LedBoots, oh my, if only I could do vanilla... Vanilla essential oil is hard to find in bulk amounts, and it's pretty expensive. The cost is a dealbreaker, but oh, it would be nice. I've been searching for an orange blossom essential oil. I haven't found it. Orange essential oil is available, but it's made from orange peels, not orange blossoms. Orange blossom fragrant oil is available, but it's partially synthetic. So I could do orange, but not specifically orange blossom.

As for using multiple oils in one soap, most handmade soap makers do combine multiple oils. This is a preference thing. If you, say, mix lavender, cedarwood, and patchouli, you'll end up with a nice scent, but it will be a somewhat general scent, meaning that maybe it's generally flowery, or another mix might be generally fruity, or just sweet smelling. Some people like that a lot. I prefer to have bold specific scents. I want my lavender soap to smell like lavender, my cedarwood soap to smell like cedarwood, etc. That's my preference, but this thread is about your preferences. What do you think? Would you prefer mixed?

Thanks.
Steven

David3, that's an amazing list!

Here's how my stuff stacks up:

1. Unscented (Yes)
2. Lots of lather (Yes)
3. No palm oil (Yes)
4. Organic (No. Haven't worked out how to keep the final product low-priced if I use organic ingredients)
5. Bar soap preferences
* Medium-sized bar (Approximately 4 oz)
* Doesn't disintegrate into goo. (Ours will disintegrate if it's left wet. In a puddle for long periods of time, it becomes goo. Otherwise, it lasts a long time)
* Packaging: Recyclable. Paper or paperboard only. No plastic (We use recycled cardboard packages with paper labels)
6. Liquid soap (We don't do that anymore. Couldn't figure out how to do it well and efficiently)
7. Price (See above post. Are you really getting a 4oz bar for $2.00? Yikes! If it's half as good as what you've described, I don't have a chance!)

Thank you for this list, though. It helps that I can compare and contrast my products against it.

Steven

NewAtThis said:

Hey, here's another question: What do you all want to see on the label? How important is it to see a full list of ingredients? Such a list isn't required by law on soap, but I feel like it's important, and I'm been using my honest labeling as a main selling point, but really, do you care about that?

Thanks.
Steven

Click to expand...

Extremely important!
I have the same priorities as David3. I also avoid palm oil, but have only used Bronners in household cleaning products and still a big bottle of tea tree years old :laugh:
There are just so many out there that buying online seems only suited to those without natural food stores, or specialty stores. Not even, I've bought Walgreens branded soap labed vegan at a discount. Wasn't called Walgreens, but Ology- I just found it! It's palm oil, paraben, and sulfate free! No artificial fragrance and vegan. I tend to stock up on things as I find bargains on good stuff.
Now that I'm thinking about soap I'm realizing how many vegan brands there are. I once played with the idea of selling soap at fairs but realized I couldn't sell at prices I wouldn't pay. i never even bothered to make it for myself because it wasn't cost effective.
I do know people pay for products like that. Look up http://www.chagrinvalleysoapandsalve.com/ they started with soap at local fair tables, now they're oniine and at Whole Foods

LedBoots, ha! This is great. I was secretly hoping that someone would be afraid of lye. This gives me a chance to geek-out in soap talk. Ok, so here's a lesson, if you have time and interest enough to read it:

Lye is an old generic term that refers to any strongly alkaline solution. For soap making, we use sodium hydroxide to make bar soap and potassium hydroxide to make liquid soap.

The process is this for bar soap: Mix the sodium hydroxide with water. It heats up to 200 degrees Fahrenheit by itself. If you touch it at this point, you get a chemical burn and a temperature burn at the same time! In the meantime, you mix all your oils together and heat them to 100 degrees. When your lye-water cools down to 100 degrees, you mix it all together. The sodium hydroxide reacts chemically with the oils in a process called saponification. By the way, when you look at an ingredients list and see something like "saponified coconut oil," that just means that it's coconut oil that has combined with lye, and if you see "Sodium coconate" or any other "Sodium ***" ingredient, that means that it's an oil combined with sodium hydroxide. Different ways of saying the same thing, and if you want to be cynical, you could say that it's two different ways of avoiding the word "lye" or "sodium hydroxide" in your ingredients list. Anyway, this saponification reaction happens, and the final result is a combination of soap, leftover oils, and glycerin. The sodium hydroxide has been all used up in the process and should no longer exist in the soap.

That being said, to get that happen properly, we measure our ingredients very specifically so that we don't put in too much lye, and we add extra oil just to be sure that there is plenty of oil for the lye to react with. And then we let it cure for 6 weeks, which allows water to evaporate, hardening the bars. After that, we do a pH test on the batch. A proper pH level is about 10. If it's more alkaline then that, then that might mean that too much sodium hydroxide was used, and it didn't all get used up, which is bad. In that case, the soap is unsellable. But I've never seen that happen. It's a safe process as long as each ingredient is measured very specifically.

So here's the thing with Grandma's soap: Back in the day, they didn't have the internet and digital scales. They had recipe books and measuring cups. It was easy to have a recipe that was a little off or a measurement that was a little off, which could result in a little too much sodium hydroxide being used, and such a "lye-heavy" bar could be a bit painful. Now, we have the luxury of websites that tell you very, very specifically how much lye to use for a given recipe, and we have digital scales that weigh it all out very precisely. And on top of that, we have the pH strips to verify the safety of the bars. It's a different world.

I'm such a soap geek. Thanks for letting me do that. The important things to remember are that every (and I mean every) product that calls itself "soap" was made with some form of lye (as required by law), even if the ingredients don't indicate that, and also that lye in it's raw form is dangerous, but in a finished bar of soap, it should be non-existent. So don't be afraid of lye. Use gloves and goggles if you ever make soap, and don't worry about it otherwise.

While I'm at it, a couple things just occurred to me:
1) Some soap makers use "melt-and-pour" soap. This is just a method where you buy soap that's already made, and then you melt it, mix some scents and colors in it, and let it cool and harden in a mold. You can get such a thing at your local hobby store. Some of those soap makers will then tell you that their soap wasn't made with lye. They are mistaken. The truth is that the soap that they bought from the hobby store was made with lye at a factory somewhere before they bought it.

2) Sodium Tallowate is an important ingredient to know if you're a vegan. It's animal fat that's been combined with sodium hydroxide. It's the number one ingredient in most store-bought soaps. It's generally fat from a pig, cow, or sheep. It's a low-cost ingredient that produces a hard bar of soap, so non-vegan soap companies love it.

Ok. I'm done geeking out, unless anyone has a question, in which case I can geek out again!

Thanks.
Steven