What Makes Lye Soap Different?

So what exactly is the big deal between cold-processed lye soap versus the liquid soap you can buy pretty much everywhere? Why would you choose to use cold-processed lye over body wash?

For starters, cold-processed lye soap begins with natural ingredients that should be familiar to you: oils and fats. Much like cooking and baking, soap requires oils and fats as its base. The combinations of oils and fats are different for every maker (and usually the secret to their soapy success), but at Wick and Wash we use a combination of palm, coconut, sunflower, and castor oils with some good old fashioned lard for our fat. Next comes the lye, which begins the process of transforming our oily soup to soap. From there we add the pretty colors and scents to spruce it up.

The result of that witches’ brew of oils and fat is an incredibly moisturizing bar of soap thanks to a little byproduct of the cold-process, uh, process called glycerin. Glycerin can work together with leftover oils that the lye did not convert, called superfats, to further moisturize your skin. Lye soap is also just more cleansing than other kinds of soap thanks to its ingredients.

So at the risk of sounding over-confident, lye soap does everything other kinds of soap does but better. Thanks to its ingredients and the way its made, it moisturizes more naturally without the need for additives and it cleans deeper naturally in the same way.