Lather soaps are 100% plant and vegetable based bars created by "Cold Process", which means that the transformation of fats and oils to soap occurs at very low temperatures - below one hundred degrees. This process (in very simplified terms) involves the introduction of an alkali solution - lye - to an acid solution - vegetable fats and oils - and a chemical reaction known as "saponification" takes place. In other words, the alkali transforms the acid into a neutral salt, or Soap.

For centuries, rendered beef fat, called "tallow", and leftover meat greases from the kitchen were the fats of choice for soapmaking, a task performed only once or twice a year in the home, or more often by a town soapmaker, who collected fats from homemakers in exchange for finished soaps and tallow candles. Lye was usually obtained by leaching water through wood ashes and collecting it in a pail under the ash box.

Legend has it that soapmaking was discovered in Rome (when it was ROME) at Mount Sapo - from which we get the word "soap" - by women doing their wash in the stream down the mountainside. It seems that rain would combine melted fats from animal sacrifices with ashes in the wood pyres and rinse the whole mess downstream, creating a soapy substance that made the clothes cleaner.

The primary oils found in vegetable-based bars are Olive, for a very mild bar of soap; Palm, for mildness and a hard bar, also known as vegetable tallow; and Coconut, crucial to the lathering and foaming qualities of the soap. Other oils (Sweet Almond, Jojoba) and butters (cocoa, shea) are utilized to enrich and/or "superfat" the soap, making it emollient and less drying.

Kathleen McGloin - copyright 1997-2001

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