Friday, July 4th, 2008

Cleaning up, au naturale

Lather up with some homemade soaps

By Dianne Smith (Contact)

Thursday, March 6th, 2008

Marysa Sacerdote stands over a 5-gallon bucket with a new hand-held kitchen mixer in her hands. “I think this one has more power than the last one,” she says, guiding the mixer through the soap mixture in the bucket.

She stares intently at the soap, daring it to set up before she gets it into the molds. Over her linen pants and T-shirt, she wears rubber gloves and a whimsical plastic apron printed with coffee cups and pastries. Sacerdote is at work, but the environment is certainly not as stressful as any corporate cubicle.

Bob Marley plays from a stereo in the living room, and a relaxing scent fills the room, a mixture of all the essential oils and the finished bars of soap stacked on shelves in the hallway. Glass bottles of essential oils sit in the windowsill amongst bud vases and other knickknacks.

This is the factory for Healing Moon Soaps, the natural soap company that Sacerdote runs out of her home in East Lawrence. She made her first batch of soap 10 years ago this month. She started selling her soaps at holiday craft shows about a year later, but it wasn’t until five years ago that her business really took off. Today, her soaps are sold at six locations in Lawrence, including The Merc, Hy-Vee and Weaver’s Department Store.

Local products are the newest trend in the all-natural industry, says Laurel Eastling, HealthMarket manager at Hy-Vee, 4000 W. Sixth St. Locally made soaps sell very well, Eastling says, because customers like that they’re natural and don’t irritate sensitive skin.

“Most of them are happy that there is an alternative, that they smell nice and that they’re not full of parabens, chemicals and other additives,” Eastling says.

The ingredients

Sacerdote makes soap out of only natural ingredients. Her basic recipe consists of palm oil, coconut oil, olive oil, filtered water and sodium hydroxide, commonly called lye, which is a naturally occurring liquid extracted from soaking wood ashes in water. For the scent, she adds essential oils, herbs and spices. Clays, iron oxides and botanicals add the coloring.

She gets her ingredients locally whenever possible. The honey in her honey-oatmeal soap comes from Blossom Trail Bee Ranch in Baldwin City. The crushed rose petals in her lavender-rose soap come from the tea roses in her own garden. She buys only high-quality ingredients and is careful about what she puts into her body or on her skin.

“Your skin is everything; everything you take in becomes a part of you,” Sacerdote says.

For her, using only plant materials is a personal decision. Homemade soap also can be made using animal products such as goat’s milk, tallow or lard. Commercial soaps, however, use synthetic chemicals that can be harsh on your skin. Eastling says a lot of customers have sensitivities to these chemicals.

Alyssa Padilla, Leavenworth junior, says natural soap is less drying. “Commercial soap sucks moisture out of your skin,” she says. “You feel like you have to put on a bottle of lotion.”

Katelyn McGill, Omaha, Neb., junior, started using natural soap because she was fed up with the products her dermatologist had prescribed for her acne. The Retin-A, a type of acne medicine, had dried out her skin and made it sensitive to sunlight.

“I had gone away from anything natural, and it was more harmful than anything,” she says. McGill started using Sacerdote’s soap about a year ago and now says her skin is smoother and less irritated.

The process

Homemade soap can be made two ways: cold-process and hot-process. Sacerdote uses the cold-process method, which uses only the heat produced by the chemical reaction of mixing the lye and the oils.

Cold-process is the simplest method because the mixture cooks itself, reaching temperatures of 130 degrees on its own. Sacerdote first mixes the filtered water and lye. She then adds the lye to a bucket of palm, coconut and olive oils and breaks out her hand-held electric mixer. She mixes the batter until it starts to thicken like pudding—what soap makers call “trace.”

While Sacerdote mans the mixer, a friend gradually pours in the ingredients that scent and color the soap. Depending on the type of soap, that could be anything from crushed rose petals and lavender essential oil to oatmeal and peppermint essential oil. The oatmeal and other plant materials serve as natural exfoliants, leaving skin smooth and refreshed.

She then pours the mixture into the wooden boxes she uses as molds. She covers the tops of the boxes with squares of cardboard then swaddles them with blankets. The boxes are stored on a stainless-steel kitchen rack nestled between her washing machine and the far corner of her kitchen.

“My life is one big game of Jenga,” she says as she maneuvers another box of soap onto the already full rack.

Now she waits. The soap needs about six weeks to finish curing before she can sell it. It first spends one week in the molds while it cooks, then she scrapes the ash off and cuts it into bars. The bars are then stored unwrapped for at least another week. Sacerdote says it’s important to let the soap cure so that it doesn’t get mushy in the shower.

Every few weeks, she reserves a whole day for soap making. It’s an efficient operation: She can make 500 bars in one day. She spends the morning measuring the ingredients and setting them out in her kitchen. Sacerdote puts Bob Marley on the stereo, ties on her apron and gets ready for a busy day at work.

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