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What is the difference between Earthceuticals all natural soap bars and synthetic detergent bars? More importantly what difference will understanding the differences make to my family? Well to make the short answer long, the use of soap goes way back in 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 same way except that we are more sophisticated with our fats and alkali's. We need not rely on using animal fats, though it is the cheapest source and is the choice of most commercial soap companies. Instead, at Earthceuticals we use a wide selection of pure food grade vegetable oils to make our specialty soaps. 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, therefore ensuring that no lye is left in the finished bar of soap.

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 calculate and approve all our formulas. Although the notion of a crafter doing this at home as a hobby may sound quaint. At Earthceuticals we are very serious about the claims we make about our products.  This is why we develop our products through scientific processes that are completely reproducible with the same results each time.

Back to the focus, real soap is a result of this saponification process using a fat or oil and an alkali. What then are synthetic soap bars? According to the FDA 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 used by companies to hide the fact that you are actually using a product mostly made up of synthetic chemicals. What are some of these chemicals?  Well, if the claim of being antibacterial is present, so is the ingredients Triclosan and Triclocarban.

The chemical names, Tetrasodium EDTA, 2,6 d-t butyl-p-cresol, Sodium Stearate, Trisodium Etidronate, sodium dodecylbenzenesulfonate, Sodium Cocoyl isethionate, cocoaamido-propylbetaine, Sodium alkylbenzenesulfonate, Lauric acid, Sodium cocoglyceryl ether sulfonate. Wow, feel like your speaking a different language?   You don't have to be a doctor or a chemist to know these are neither soap nor 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. (Please see our article in our News Section entitled Triclosan.)

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