The base oils
Olive oil is the backbone of most bars. It makes a mild, conditioning soap with a low, creamy lather. On its own it produces a bar so soft it takes months to cure — which is why it’s blended.
Coconut oil is the opposite: hard, and it lathers enthusiastically even in hard water. Too much and it strips your skin. We keep it between 20 and 25% in most recipes.
Palm oil gives hardness and a stable lather that coconut alone can’t. Ours is RSPO Mass Balance certified. We’ve tried building the line without it and the bars were either too soft or too harsh; when a supplier without a certificate is the only option, we don’t buy.
Shea butter goes in at 5–8% as superfat — it survives saponification largely intact and is most of why the bars don’t feel stripping.
Beef tallow appears in the lotion bar and the hand salve. It’s grass-fed, from a butcher two hours south, and it makes an occlusive layer nothing plant-based quite matches on split winter knuckles. If that’s not for you, the Balsam & Shea Body Butter does a similar job without it.
Scent
Essential oils wherever they exist and behave. Balsam fir needle is distilled in Quebec. Black spruce, cedarwood, juniper berry, wild mint, peppermint and eucalyptus are all essential oils.
Some scents don’t exist as essential oils — cloudberry, amber, hay, cold smoke. Those are phthalate-free fragrance blends, and we say so on the product page rather than implying everything is botanical. A “cloudberry essential oil” does not exist, and anyone selling you one is selling you something else.
Nothing is scented above 4% of batch weight, which is IFRA-compliant for leave-on and rinse-off both.
Colour
Clays, botanicals and oxides. Kaolin, French green clay, Moroccan rhassoul, bentonite, activated hardwood charcoal, madder root, annatto, spirulina, and cosmetic-grade iron oxides.
No mica in the soap. It looks good in a photograph and washes off as glitter, which ends up in the lake.
What’s never in anything
Sodium lauryl sulfate. Sodium laureth sulfate. Parabens. Phthalates. Synthetic dyes. Triclosan. EDTA. Formaldehyde donors. Palm without a certificate.
Reading a label
Cold-process soap is a chemical reaction, so the ingredients list names what went into the pot rather than what comes out. “Saponified olive oil” means olive oil that has reacted with sodium hydroxide — there is no free lye in a finished, cured bar, and any soap that contains lye as such would be unusable.
Full ingredient lists sit on every product page. If you react to something and want to know whether it’s in a specific bar, ask before you order rather than after.
Packaging
Kraft paper bands, kraft boxes, black tissue, paper tape, jute twine. Amber glass and metal tins, both of which are worth keeping and both of which recycle.
No plastic in anything we ship except the pump on the lotion bottle, which we haven’t found a decent alternative for yet. If you have one, tell us.