Sabao Soul's Organic/Natural Soap vs. Commercial Brands
The choice between organic/natural soap bars and larger commercial brands often depends on several factors, including personal preferences, skin type, environmental concerns, and ingredient transparency. Here's a breakdown of the key considerations and Sabao Soul’s approach, practices and promises:
Ingredients
Organic/Natural Soap Bars: Typically made with plant-based ingredients, essential oils, and fewer synthetic additives. They often avoid harsh chemicals, preservatives, and artificial fragrances, making them suitable for sensitive skin.
Bigger Brands: May contain synthetic ingredients, preservatives, and fragrances that can irritate some skin types. However, some larger brands also offer "natural" lines that use more organic ingredients.
Sabao Soul’s Practice:
We use all natural ingredients and essential oils. Each recipe is specifically designed to support the healing/nourishment of the skin to alleviate common skin problems.
All our natural soaps include Olive oil, Coconut oil, Canola oil, and Castor oil as the main ingredients. All-natural sodium lactate is added to all bars to increase bar hardness, preserve bar ingredients and increase a bars humectant properties adding moisture to the skin. The Lye solution for soap development is produced in house with commercial grade Sodium Hydroxide and distilled water. The Lye is the catalyst for the oil/butter saponification process and is used in all natural soaps.
Specific recipes to alleviate skin problems may include Cocoa Butter, Shea Butter, natural plant glycerin, Goat Milk, Donkey Milk, Vitamin E, Sabao Soul’s rendered Ribeye beef fat to produce high quality tallow, Vitamin E, Activated Charcoal, Bentonite clay and Sabao Soul’s grown and processed plant/herb material: Tomato, Spearmint leaves, Banana Leaves, Rose Leaf/Oil and Canna Lily Leaves.
Other materials may include Coffee beans, Green Tea Leaves, Himalayan Salt, Cinnamon, Nutmeg, Ginger, and All Spice. We only use pure essential oils for our scents.
Coloration of our products are either produced by natural plant and fruit materials, natural clays, or mica. Mica is a naturally occurring mineral coated with metal oxides for coloration. We strive to source mica that is coated with natural colorations. Mica also provides a sparkly effect in our soaps. We do not use synthetic coloring in any of our products. Dyes utilized in many commercial products are synthetical chemicals. Red #3 has been recently banned in food and health care products due to its significant health risks including the potential to cause cancer.
Why do we use items like banana leaves, spearmint leaves, tomatoes, and other plant/herb materials?
Besides using a renewable resource, these items provide great natural benefits to the skin along with natural gentle exfoliants. We have a customer whose young daughter calls me the tomato guy. Several months ago, her mother approached us with her skin issues due to radiation treatment for breast cancer. The radiation treatments left her skin discolored, rough with small rash like bumps. She confided she has spent lots of money on medications, curative lotions, etc. and they had not worked to alleviate these issues. We recommended our all-natural tomato and spearmint leave soaps. Since using it, she has seen tremendous amount of skin lightening along with the rash being no longer present. It has also made her skin softer and more conditioned. Tomatoes contain lycopene. Lycopene is a natural antioxidant that promotes skin healing. Spearmint leaves have antimicrobial and antibacterial properties. These all-support healthy skin growth and replacement of damaged skin. We are proud to have helped her realize her need and desire for better skin.
Skin Sensitivity
If you have sensitive skin or conditions like eczema or allergies, organic/natural soaps may be gentler and less irritating due to their simpler, more transparent ingredient lists.
Sabao Soul’s Approach:
By using high quality natural ingredients, our soaps create a lather that cleanses the skin while conditioning, moisturizing and adding key amino acids, vitamins, and minerals to assist with these conditions. We formulate a super fat of 5% oil in our soap. This means that 5% of the oils and butters used remain in their natural state. These extra oils and butters are key to support healthy skin, conditioning and moisturizing. The key purpose of soap is to remove germs, excess oils, and dirt. All-natural soaps do this very effectively, while replacing and adding great natural skin supportive and protective oils and butters to the skin.
Environmental Impact
Organic/Natural Soaps: Often produced with environmentally friendly practices, minimal packaging, and biodegradable ingredients.
Bigger Brands: May have a larger carbon footprint due to mass production and distribution, though some companies are adopting more sustainable practices.
Sabao Soul’s Approach:
We take pride in decreasing our carbon footprint and using as many natural and recycled packaging components as possible. Our products may not have fancy boxes coated with wax, printed designs, etc. We use biodegradable shrink wrap and minimal labeling materials to protect our products. Our shipping materials are of recycled boxes and packages. We use recyclable tissue papers and cellulose peanuts for cushioning our products for shipping. Unfortunately, these materials are typically more expensive than traditional plastic, but we believe it is worth the cost to reduce our carbon footprint.
Many of our oils are received in plastic containers that are not recyclable. We sterilize and reuse most of these containers within our business for storage of our plant and other materials we produce for inclusion in our soaps. This year we will use many of these containers for growing plants like tomatoes, spearmint, peppermint, etc. They make great backyard and small patio gardens.
We welcome any request for containers that can be used for school projects, DIY projects, etc. There are many creative ways to re-use these items.
Cost
Natural and organic soaps are often more expensive than mass-produced brands due to the quality of ingredients and smaller production runs.
Sabao Soul’s Promise:
It is true that a customer may perceive the cost of natural organic soaps as a much higher costs than large volume production of commercial soaps produced with manufactured chemicals ingredients. Manufactured ingredients are less expensive due to large production volume and large production volume of the soap itself.
If you consider using an all-natural soap bar like my Tomato soap customer above to help alleviate skin issues and can reduce your cost of chemical ingredient creams and medicines, the higher cost may be worth it. Plus, you are helping in reducing our carbon footprint and use of non-renewable resources.
We strive to keep our soap production and material costs as low as possible. We all see the prices of oils and other natural ingredients steadily rise plus production costs in labor, electricity, and equipment does add to these costs. All-natural soaps are very different when it comes to production. Our bars are formulated and created in small batches of 9-10 bars. We use the cold process for creating our bars. These batches must go through a 24–36-hour gel phase before unmolding. They then rest for another 24 hours before hand cutting. Each bar is then placed in a climate-controlled environment to cure for 3-4 weeks. This allows for the process of saponification. Saponification is the process of converting oils and butters to soap. It is true that you can use an all-natural soap bar after the pH has lowered under a pH of 10. This is typically reached with 24-48 hours after creating the soap batter. The key to a great and long-lasting soap is the length of time allowed for the soap chains to form within a bar of soap. After 48 hours, soap chains are small and the bars readily dissolved due to water content and lack of long soap chains. The best-known long-lasting soap is true Castille soap. These soaps are cured for a minimum of 6-months but typically cured for a year or more. The length of time of production and cure time does add to the cost of all-natural soaps.
Essential oils are another key factor in cost. Most do not realize that fragrances used in most commercial soaps are key culprits in skin issues. Fragrances are made of chemicals and companies add additional additives to their bars to combat the harmful effects. High quality essential oils add not just a great aroma to the soap but also provide benefits to the skin. Essential oils assist with nourishment, hydration, killing germs (antibacterial and antimicrobial), soothing irritated skin. They also provide a positive impact on your mood and emotions.
Performance
Some users find that natural soaps can be less foamy, or moisturizing compared to commercial brands, which often include surfactants and moisturizers. However, many people prefer the feel and scent of natural soaps.
Sabao Soul’s Take:
We have all grown up with commercials of big bubbles and heavy foam produced by commercial soaps. The fact is bubbles do not necessarily mean cleaning. Cleaning ability of soap is due to micelle formation. When soap is mixed with water, the molecules arrange themselves into tiny spheres called micelles, with the hydrophobic tails facing inward to trap dirt and oil, while the hydrophilic heads face outward to interact with water. This is the cleaning process we use daily. While the cleaning mechanism is the same for any soap/beauty bar, natural soaps use plant-based oils and fats instead of harsh synthetic chemicals, which can be gentler on the skin.
We can increase the bubble formation by simply adding a little bit of sugar to our formulas. Most of our soaps are designed to be highly conditioning and moisturizing so bubble factor is not a key feature. We take pride in our soaps being creamier with increased ability to support your skin. A simple way to add more bubbles to your all-natural soap is to rub a soap sponge and use the sponge to bathe.
Ethics and Transparency
Smaller brands often prioritize ethical sourcing and transparency about their ingredients, while larger companies may lack this level of detail.
Sabao Soul’s Promise:
We are always open to questions on our processes, ingredients, and other aspects of our soap production. We list all our ingredients and are transparent of where and how we obtain our ingredients. We field lots of questions from our website, social media outlets, and at our participation in local Farmer’s Markets.