What is the difference between soap bars and detergent bars? and more importantly what difference will knowing make to my family? Well to make the short answer long, first off soap has a pretty long history.

The first accounts of soap date back several thousand years to women washing clothes in a river in ancient Rome. They noticed it was easier to wash them below Mt. Sapo where a mixture of ash and animal fats was entering the river. The Romans soon developed the making of soap bars from animal fats and the alkali source from ash. Today we refer to "saponification" of fats using an alkali in reference making soap and this pays reference to ancient Mt. Sapo of Roman times.

Today real soap is made the exact same way except that we are more sophisticated with our fats and alkali's. We need not rely on using animal lard or tallow for fats, though it is the cheapest source and is the choice of most commercial soaps. Instead, we have a wide selection of pure food grade vegetable source oils to use to make specialty soaps with. And instead of using ash, we can easily obtain sodium hydroxide, or lye to use as an alkali source. The advantage of this apart from convenience is that we can calculate precisely how much sodium hydroxide it will take to saponify a precise blend of plant oils, each having a different molecular weight.

There is room here for a whole article on just this, and why you really need to know who is making these formulas and how the lye and oils are being both measured and mixed. We have a resident in house doctor with a chemistry, organic chemistry, biochemistry and environmental chemistry background who calculates and approves all our formulas and processes. Although the notion of a crafter doing this at home as a hobby may sound quaint... well it is quaint, but we are serious about our soap. We do not make craft soaps and we are not hobbyists.

Back to the focus, then real soap is a result of this saponification process using a fat or oil and an alkali. What then are synthetic soap bars? Well let me quote the FDA on this:

the product you regard as soap may not be soap at all, but a synthetic detergent "beauty" or "bath" bar. These and similar names have been used by copywriters to spare the consumer the awful knowledge that she is not bathing herself with real soap, but with a synthetic detergent

So, if most commercial bar soaps are not really soap at all, what is in them? Well they are mostly chemical surfactants and detergents. We mainly associate washing our clothes or our cars with detergents, few people realize they bathe in them daily. What are in these detergent bars? If they are also antibacterial then the ingredients triclosan and triclocarban are in them. We have an article on those ingredients. If they are plain detergent bath bars then they probably contain some of these:

Tetrasodium EDTA, 2,6 d-t butyl-p-cresol, sodium stearate, trisodium etidronate, sodium dodecylbenzenesulfonate, sodium cocoyl isethionate, cocoaamidopropylbetaine, sodium alkylbenzenesulfonate, lauric acid, sodium cocoglyceryl ether sulfonate.

You don't have to be a doctor or a chemist to know these are neither soap or natural ingredients. As the skin makes for a superior delivery system for chemicals to enter the body, you can see why it is undesirable for your bath bars to contain cresols and benzenes.

Earthceuticals soaps are completely natural and contain nothing artificial. There are no preservatives, no antibacterial agents, no artificial colors, no artificial scents, just 100% plant based oils, phytol rich plant infusions and pure essential oils.