Big Changes

It seems like there are lots of changes in the air around here.  As I reported, earlier this year, we worked on changing our labels.

The biggest change to our product is happening right now though.

Over the years, Palm oil has become more and more controversial as its demand has caused deforestation which endangered and destroyed the habitats of many creatures (in particular, orangutans) while contributing to climate change.  We really do not want to encourage, even on our small part, these unethical practices and we hear from many of our customers that they don't either.  We have attempted to acquire sustainably harvested palm, but find it not only difficult to find, but hard to validate.

As a result, for some time, we have been experimenting and researching, trying to figure out how to change our soap formulation to keep the quality the same while removing palm oil from our recipe.

At the beginning of the month, we started making our soaps with rice bran oil replacing the palm. Because palm added to the hardness of the bar, we also added a small amount of sodium lactate to each batch which helps to harden soap.

You will probably not notice any difference in your soap except in the list of contents on the label, but we will all feel better about making and using our soaps.

New Soap Labels

We were working on new labeling since the end of last year when we found that we could no longer purchase the paper we always used for the "cigar band" labels for our soap.  We have always liked the idea of a stick on label that would allow buyers to actually see the soap because while all of our soaps are beautiful, some seem to almost be miniature works of art. This gave us the opportunity to make some changes.

We tried a couple of things, but finally found a size and color that worked for us - the result looks very similar to our old labels:

Until you realize there is no label on the back or one of the sides:

All the pertinent - and required information is still readily available on one side, but the colors and designs of the soap are fully visible, and as always, it is easy to smell the scent of the soap through the stretch wrap.

We are pretty happy with this new label.

We hope you will like it too.