Dear Readers,
So for the first week of December, I wanted to focus on soaps. Natural soaps were some of the first natural products with which I experimented. Soaps are a simple and easy way to venture into the natural product world. Most natural soaps out there work fairly well from what I hear from friends and from what I know to be true from personal experience. The first natural soap I ever tried was a Peppermint Castile Soap made my Dr. Bronner's. The setting was a shower in Tucson in the middle of August. It was a glorious experience! The peppermint in Dr. Bronner's Liquid Peppermint Castile Soap is rather concentrated and leaves you feeling fresh and cool all over, a great relief for me (as you can imagine) in the middle of a Tucson summer. Dr. Bronner's liquid Castile soaps are olive oil based and gentle on the skin. If the peppermint is too much of an intense experience for you, you can always try any one of their 7 other scents. My second favorite is the lavender scent. My least favorite is Tea Tree. The Tea Tree smells a bit like old leather, but hey different strokes for different folks right?
One container of Dr. Bronner's can go a long way, especially if used sparingly. I have found it both at Whole Foods and Kroger. I have not found that Harris Teeter carries it. Harris Teeter, however, does carry a similar soap by the name of Dr. Wood, which works just as well.
Why use Dr. Bronner's or other natural soaps as opposed to non-natural soaps?
The answer to this question, as is often the case, lies in the ingredients. Dr. Bronner's soaps and many other natural soap brands use naturally derived ingredients, such as vegetable and essential oils.
Dr Bronner's soap ingredients: Water, Saponified Organic Coconut*, Organic Palm* and Organic Olive* Oils (w/Retained Glycerin), Organic Hemp Oil, Organic Jojoba Oil, Essential Oils**, Citric Acid, Vitamin E
Now let us juxtapose these ingredients to those of a (not-to-be-named) name brand non-natural soap: Water, Sodium Laureth Sulfate, Cocamidopropyl Betaine, Glycerin, Decyl Glucoside, Fragrance, PEG-18 Glyceryl Cocoate, Polyquaternium-10, Cocamidopropyl PG-Dimonium Chloride, Glycol Distearate, Laureth-4, Sodium Benzoate, Citric Acid, Sodium Chloride. (CI 77007), Blue 1 (CI 42090)
See the difference? If there is one thing you take away from this blog... it is to look at ingredient lists. After a quick google search I found that Sodium Laureth Sulfate, although not carcinogenic is sometimes found in products also containing 1,4-dioxane - a known carcinogen. Cocamidopropyl betaine, the second ingredient in the list has been found to be a common allergen, and it seems as though polyquaternium 10's toxicity is questionable. Admittedly, much of this information comes from Wikipedia. (Thank you Wikipedia.... Please donate to Wikipedia ya'll). Therefore, more extensive research needs to be done to fact check me. But overall the verdict does not look so good for the non-natural soap. And I did not even get through half the ingredient list!
I do not mean for this post to sound like an advertisement for Dr. Bronner's. I suppose Dr. Bronner's is one of the first and only natural soaps I have ever used. Hence the bias account. However, I know there to be many other brands of natural soaps out there that are also worth exploring. So go and explore my dears, but also be smart. Read your ingredients lists, and I assure you the world will open up to you.
