Simple, natural ingredients
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a little about our bars
When we design a soap recipe, we make it thinking about the health of your skin. After all, your skin is your largest organ and you want to treat it right to keep it glowing! What’s the point in making soap for your skin if it has bad ingredients in it that won’t benefit your skin in some way? There are so many healthy options to choose from to use when creating a bar of soap which is why we encourage you to read our ingredients list on our bars. We’ll go through and share insider information on our ingredients and the benefits you’ll find from using our handcrafted bars.
what's inside
sierra snowmelt
oil & butter
Okay, let’s talk base ingredients. In all our uniquely handcrafted bars, we start pretty simply: water, lye, and organic food-grade oils. Now our ‘water’ isn’t just regular ol’ tap water or distilled as so many soap makers use. Nope. Here at Wild Sierra Soap, we get our water from the Sierra Mountains in the form of snowmelt. What makes that special? It’s pretty well known that if you try to make soap with tap water, the chlorine and other minerals will give you (what’s known in the soap business) dreaded orange spots. Now those orange spots won’t harm you other than making for little bumps in the soap and not looking very pretty. Distilled water will keep the ‘dreaded orange spots’ at bay, but then you’re missing out on some nutrients that Mother Nature put in our water. Dilemma solved! Our Sierra snowmelt allows us to keep in all the great minerals found in water and add those skin-loving nutrients to our handcrafted small batched soap bars, and in turn, pass them on to your skin without any dreaded orange spots in our designs. Wah-la! Pretty soap made from snow that contains the benefits of water.
We love to use organic coconut oil, olive oil, and rice bran oil as our base oils to saponify (that’s soap talk for lye/water mixing with oils) with our sierra snowmelt and lye. (We add others too, so be sure to read the descriptions for each of the bars.) Many of our soaps also boast having sweet almond oil, castor oil, meadowfoam oil, or hempseed oil. Then there are butters, like shea, cocoa, and aloe: mmmm, delightful pampering for your skin. You’ll find a generous amount of butters in our soaps too, often up to 20% of the formula! Talk about talking a luxurious time bathing. But heck, we don’t stop there. Oh, no. We must keep trying to make it better and better. We continue to devise our own uniquely handcrafted recipes and add lots of ‘skin-citing’ ingredients.
fragrances
Our fragrances are all phthalate-free. But what’s phthalate anyways? They are basically substances added to plastics that are meant to increase their flexibility, transparency, durability, and longevity. They are used primarily to soften polyvinyl chloride (PVC). Hmmm. No need for that in our soap. Sadly, many fragrance oils do have phthalates, and some soapers believe that the scents hang on stronger and deeper when a phthalate is an active ingredient. We prefer to ‘anchor’ our lighter scents by adding clays to our soaping formulas. The scents “stick’ and you get the benefits of natural clay. Sounds like a winning solution to that little potential recipe problem!
If you are looking for a totally fragrance-free bar, then check out our ‘Natural bars.’ Here you’ll find Sierra Snow: (our 100% olive oil Castile bar that is cured for a minimum of 12 months) or our Beeswax and Honey bar: where the scent here depends on the bees! This bar is always a delightful surprise, depending on the flowers visited by the bees. Both the beeswax and the honey can take on different floral scents. A luxurious bar influenced by the local bees in northern Nevada, as we buy as many of our ingredients from local sources as possible, and both wax and honey are two of them.
colors
We love to work with colors! Swirls, whirls, and curls of bright and bold color. So, what do you need to know about our colors? Well, we chose mica’s that (to the best of our ability) are from natural sources and are sourced ethically—an important to us factor in our purchasing of materials to use. Black: most of the black color you see in our soaps is from activated charcoal. It’s a great cleanser, and it makes a stunning contrast between bar layers. However, be aware that because it is charcoal, in large quantities, it can coat your washcloth, sink or shower with its black powdery residue. Browns in our soap are either from micas or cocoa powder. Real chocolate infused into the bar. Just another way we help spoil you.
ECO-FRIENDLY TOPS
Glitter? Nope, not at all. Why those tops may glisten like snow on a sunny day, our sparkly tops come to us from the ocean (algae) or are mineral-based. The glitter we use has no adverse effects on the environment. They’re also vegan and obtained without testing on animals, so therefore cruelty-free. So, when most glitters are PET plastic based and, therefore, do not break down readily in the environment, the ones we use do break down and do not harm marine wildlife.
& SKIN NOURISHING INGREDIENTS
Clays like kaolin or bentonite add a nice ‘slip’ to a bar, as do the jojoba beads, that also are also a super gentle exfoliant. Many of our soaps also contain milk for adding skin-loving nutrients. We can’t quite decide which bar is the ‘favorite.’ Mojito and Blueberry boast 20% Shea butter and jojoba beads in their formula; while our Goat milk or Buttermilk bars shout, “Pick me, pick me, as your favorite!” Looking for a natural exfoliant in your bar? Our top sellers are Mojito with jojoba beads, Lemon Lavender Poppyseed, with, as its name suggests, exfoliating poppy seeds. We also love Blueberry, which has both poppy seeds and jojoba beads, or our Oatmeal bars that come with real oats that we grind ourselves before adding then to this handcrafted goat milk bar.