Why Make Soap?
Why on earth would anyone go to all that trouble to make something you can buy for less than a dollar at the store? One of the ways to answer this question is to imagine using a bar of your wonderful handmade soap. Once you've used soap you made by hand with contemporary techniques, there is no going back to store-bought. There is enormous satisfaction in saying, “I made this.” And perhaps that is the main reason to make your own soap.
To Control What's in the Soap
Besides the hands-on experience of using handmade soap, there are many other reasons to make it yourself. One of the most significant is that you can control exactly what you use to make your soap and thus decide what you and your family use to bathe. For example, many soapers began out of a desire to alleviate a child's adverse reaction to commercial soap.
Many people who have never been able to use most commercial soaps comfortably find they can use handmade soap. They may be sensitive to the nonsoap parts of commercial soap, rather than to the soap itself. Encourage friends and family with such sensitivities to give handmade soaps a try.
When you make your own soap, you can control the kind of fragrance you want. For example, if you love handmade soap and also love the smell of a certain striped green commercial soap, you can find that fragrance at soap-supply Web sites. You can also add only natural essences or you can add no fragrance at all if you like.
To Create Beautiful, Useful Things
Another reason why people make soap is a desire to create beautiful, useful things. Motivation can range from wanting to capture the essence of a favorite flower to wanting to have a perfect color match for a newly painted bathroom. The beauty of herbs and flowers, the harmony of well-orchestrated color, and the tactile satisfaction of varied textures are all artistic elements that can be incorporated into a simple bar of soap.
Along with being beautiful, handmade soap is also, of course, useful. What could be more useful than a bar of soap? No matter how fancy and fabulous you make it, it still does one basic, essential thing: It cleans. Soap not only cleans skin, but you can make soap to clean hair, clothes, dishes, pets, carpets, and more. Almost anything that can be washed can be washed with handmade soap.
