What “chemical free” means to us

“Chemical free” is one of the most used phrases in this industry and one of the least defined. It is on our page too. A phrase we use is a phrase we should be able to say the meaning of, out loud, without reaching for the next adjective — so this is us doing that. Not a defence of the words. A definition of them, in the only terms that can actually be checked: what is in our formulations, and what we keep out.

What we mean by it

We mean that our formulations are built from plant oils, butters, clays, botanicals and essential oils — and that a specific list of cheap industrial shortcuts is not in them. That is the claim. It is a claim about what we buy and what we refuse, and every line of it is on the ingredients page with an INCI name next to it.

We do not mean “untouched by chemistry”, and neither does anyone else who uses the phrase, whether or not they have thought about it. Water is a chemical. Shea butter is several hundred of them. If that is the definition you are working with, no soap on earth qualifies, and the phrase tells you nothing about the bar in your hand. Ours is narrower and duller and it has the advantage of being falsifiable.

The list, which is the actual claim

Six things we do not put in, and the honest reason for each. Hold us to all of them.

• No SLS or SLES. Not because they are poison — they are not — but because at the concentration that makes a big lather they are drying, and we would rather get the lather from coconut oil and castor, which costs more and behaves better.
• No parabens. A bar of soap is alkaline, which is a hostile place for a microbe to try to live, so it does not need a preservative and does not have one. That is a formulation fact rather than a virtue.
• No palm oil. This one costs us real money: palm makes a harder, cheaper, more reliable bar than rice bran and coconut do. We think the deforestation arithmetic settles it.
• No synthetic fragrance in the soaps and salts. Essential oils and absolutes only, bought by origin, which is why the Rose costs what it does — rose absolute runs to roughly a hundred times the price of a rose fragrance oil.
• No mineral oil or paraffin. Both are petroleum fractions. Paraffin is the standard candle wax because it is cheap and takes scent well; we pour soy and beeswax, which cost more and tunnel more readily.
• No animal testing, by us or by anyone we buy from.

And four things we do not pretend

A list with nothing awkward in it is not a list, it is a poster. So here is the awkward half, which we would rather write down ourselves than have you discover:

• The candles are the exception to the fragrance rule. They use an IFRA-compliant blend that includes synthetics, because the soy and beeswax we pour will not carry an essential oil far enough across a room to be worth your money. It is on the candle pages too.
• The dessert and novelty soaps are coloured with cosmetic-grade mica. Our adult bars take their colour from the ingredient — beetroot, turmeric, charcoal, clay — but you cannot get a pastel macaron out of a vegetable, and we would rather say mica than imply the colour grew somewhere.
• The aloe gel contains a preservative — phenoxyethanol, well under the permitted limit, named on the page. It is water and plant pulp in a jar in a hot country. Without one it would grow mould inside a week, and a contaminated gel is not the purer option.
• The glycerin base is not ours. We buy it already made, we do not make it from scratch, and the craft here is the formulation, the colour, the shape and the pour.

The lye question, answered properly

Soap is what happens when a fat meets a strong alkali, and the alkali is lye. That is true of the base we buy, of every bar in every shop, and of the one your great-grandmother boiled from wood ash and animal fat. No free lye survives the reaction — it is spent making the soap — but we are not going to tell you it left no trace, because the trace is the bar. Soap is what the lye and the oil became. There is no version of soap that skipped the step.

What we can tell you is that no lye comes into this workshop. We do not keep sodium hydroxide in a small room with people in it; we buy the base already made. That is a safety decision, we made it on purpose, and we are not embarrassed by it. It also means the phrase, as we use it, is about the things we chose to put in and leave out — not a claim that chemistry was not involved in making soap soap.

The question underneath

Most people asking “is it chemical free” are asking something more precise than the words suggest: what is in it, where did it come from, and why is it there. That has an answer for every single line, and we have written all of them down on the ingredients page. It is longer and less reassuring than a two-word claim, and it is checkable, which we think is the more durable form of reassurance.