2008 Bars

This season's selection will have many repeats of last year's favorites with some upgrades. I'll also be presenting a couple of new recipes. I'll post the complete list in a day or two. Please stop by the Cherrywood Art Fair to see and smell this year's goodness.

Here's a sneak peak of just a few bars.

Manifesto--Some Soaps Are Better Than Others

It’s true. And handmade soaps are toward the top of the list. You’d have to look pretty hard to find commercial soaps as good as your basic handmade stuff. Even then, the commercial stuff would be pretty expensive.

The reason? Saponification (making oil into soap) releases glycerin molecules into the soap. Commercial soapers squeeze out the glycerin and sell it as a separate product—leaving the soap unnecessarily harsh and drying. In handmade soaps that glycerin remains in the soap to care for and moisturize your skin. Even the most basic handmade soap will feel better, and treat your skin better, than the stuff you buy at the grocery store.

Glycerin is not the only thing good about handmade soaps. Most hand soapers take much greater pride in their product than do the commercial guys. We start with better, more expensive oils, more natural fragrances and additives (rather than petroleum derivatives), and we infuse all that with the care and attention that’s bred in the hours we spend over the stove stirring, and stirring and stirring, and, oh yeah, stirring. We don’t have time to waste making bad soap.

Each of the oils we choose has different properties, and if used alone will produce a substantially different soap. We choose the oils in each soap carefully, to balance their characteristics and produce soaps that are good, unique and have personality. Buff Daddy soaps may be better or worse than other handmade soaps, but all of ours will kick the heck out of the store bought stuff. The commercial guys can’t touch us.

Natural vs. Organic: a little white lye
We’d love to label all our Buff Daddy soaps as “organic,” but we just can’t do it. We’ve gone to great care to choose only high quality organic ingredients whenever possible. When we can’t get the appropriate organic ingredients, we choose only ingredients that are completely without additives, preservatives, colorants, etc. But no matter how hard we try, there’s just one thing we can’t do: lye.

Most soap, handmade or commercial, relies upon lye to “saponify” oil (those that don’t use lye use other, similar chemicals). Lye, on it’s own, is pretty nasty stuff. But if you add it to the right amount of oil it makes a wonderful soap. The problem is there isn’t an organic, sustainable way to make lye. The organic way involves leaching lye out of the ashes left behind by burning hard woods—not exactly a sustainable solution. The commercial process (the electrolysis of salt-water) is not so objectionable that clear cutting hardwood forests is really justified. So, we use non-organic, but sustainable, lye and make do by calling our soap “natural.”

Ugly but good
You might have noticed that Buff Daddy soaps are a little rough around the edges—kind of like us. Rather than have a slew of molds, Buff Daddy soaps are made in a single, large mold and then hand cut into individual bars (we have a really big knife). The bars are roughly the same size and shape, but none are perfect and none are exactly the same. You’ll find odd edges, angles and sides. They have personality. Every time we pick an odd one up we’re reminded of the hand made nature of the soap. We like it that way. We hope you do, too.

Distributed democracy: You, too, can make soap
Home soapers may be talented crafters, but they’re not brain surgeons. Making soap has been done for thousands of years and it really boils down (ahem) to determined cooking. All you have to do is add lye to some oil, stir for awhile, throw in your scents and colors, and pour the mess into a mold and let it sit for a few weeks. Now, with anything, the devil is in the details, but the details here are not that complicated. And we’d be remiss not to point out that working with lye is kind of dangerous. It should be done by grown-ups only with the most careful precautions, and not done by children at all. But don’t be discouraged by those disclaimers. The process is not hard. It’s fun. It’s exciting. And you can create your favorite soaps to your heart’s content. If you’re interested, there are a lot of good sites on the web you should check out.

Here are a few good places to start:

waltonfeed.com/old/soaphome.html
alcasoft.com/soapfact/history.html
colebrothers.com/soap/
teachsoap.com/

A great place to buy your stuff:

texasnaturalsupply.com/