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At Kopa Haiku, we hand make our soaps from start to finish. We started in 1999 as a home business, but after a couple of years we couldn't fit anymore, so we moved. The soap business had literally squeezed us out of our own house! Now, we make our soap in part of a renovated pineapple cannery, but still right here in Haiku, Maui, Hawaii. While many companies are selling "hand-crafted" soaps, ours are actually hand made, which is a very different thing. (When you see hand-crafted on a label, it usually means that the maker bought unscented melt & pour soap and added some "stuff" to it . . . color, scent, glitter, or whatever.) We don't add any of that 'stuff' to our soaps--if it doesn't add some benefit for you or your skin, we leave it out. We believe in the minimalist approach: sometimes less really is more! We make our soaps from the highest-quality oils available, all pure vegetable oils, and we superfat the soap-in-process with macadamia nut and kukui nut oils. This means we add those two oils very late in the mixing process, to ensure that their skin-care properties are retained in the final product. This is why our soap moisturizes your skin, unlike cheaper soaps that can leave you dry and itchy, reaching for the lotion out of necessity rather than desire. The superfatting process means great things for your skin, but it also presents huge challenges as a business, because it means the products have a shorter shelf-life than mass-produced soaps. Our soaps are good for 1-2 years, depending on the conditions they're stored under. Cool, dry and well ventilated means better staying power than hot, damp, or wrapped up tight. Putting our soaps in a warm closet in a ziploc bag is just about the worst thing you could do! Our soaps are made by "batching" our hand made soap base (you can think of it as milling, although it's really not). We melt our soap base in large kettles, stirring constantly until the soap is completely melted, and adding additional ingredients to make it smell good or do other good things for your skin (depends on the recipe that day). Then, we pour it into wooden molds and let it cool. After about 24 hours, it's solid enough to cut, and we then put it on wire racks to begin the drying process. After 10-14 days, each bar is hand-trimmed (to avoid sharp edges that would tear the tissue we wrap them in later) and then re-shelved to finish drying. At 21-28 days, it's usually ready to wrap, depending on local weather conditions. Extreme humidity can slow the process, just as dry weather can speed it up. When dry, each bar is wrapped by hand, labeled, and ready to ship to the lucky recipient. Macadamia nut oil and kukui nut oil, besides being very Hawaiian, are also very good for your skin. Hawaiians have known it for centuries! Kukui nut oil can aid in healing sunburn, and both are good for dry or itchy skin, mature skin, and have been known to help even those suffering from eczema or psoriasis. No claim is being made that they'll completely heal these afflictions, but they certainly can help to ease dryness, itching, and suffering. Both oils are high in linolenic and linoleic acids, which are thought to aid the skin in it's natural regeneration process. Milling is what they do to soap in France (and other similarly civilized places). In order to mill soap, you first have to remove the natural glycerin (that's where all the extra glycerin comes from!) and other sticky stuff so it won't clog the machinery. Then. the soap is pressed flat between rollers (picture the mangle on an old-fashioned washing machine) and flaked into thin flakes. Triple-milled soap means they do it three times. Then, the soap is pressed into bars that are so hard they'll crack and fall apart before they actually are all washed up! Milled soaps last forever, but they won't do much for moisturizing your skin, and many of them are made from sodium tallowate, which is just a fancy word for animal-fat, or tallow. Batching, on the other hand, is simply melting down soap to form new soap. This is technically what we do to create our cream soaps, batching or sometimes it's called rebatching, don't ask me why. (Don't I have to batch before I can rebatch? Apparently not.) Anyway, this can be done in a variety of ways, and no, I'm not going to tell you exactly how we do it. You can use almost any kind of liquid you can think of, with a variety of results depending on many many different factors. It can be fun, it can be frustrating, but it's always always interesting! If you want to try it yourself there's also lots of places you can buy pre-made soap to play with and it's not all just the glycerin kind. A basic internet search will yield many choices. |
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| If you're dying to try soapmaking yourself for fun, there's tons of books available that are dying to tell you how to do it, and if you're interested enough there's plenty of into available on the internet. My best advice: BE CAREFUL! One of the first books I bought had an error, and when you're working with lye you cannot afford those! Check and double-check your facts before you work with caustic chemicals. |