Lady Fox Soaps (Lavender cleans, dilly dilly)

The past several months I've been washing myself with fine handmade lavender soap made by my soapstress, Iris Hutchings. She is the proprietor of Lady Fox Soaps which opened its virtual doors here in Madison to the public last year. While normally found hunched over a vat keeping watch on the saponification process, Iris took a break and answered some questions that I posed to her recently:

FS: When and why did you start making soap?

Iris: I started about 5 years ago, after I graduated from college. One day I was eating a chocolate bar, and some of it melted on my finger. I licked my finger, and instead of tasting the chocolate, I could only taste the soap I'd used earlier to wash my hands. That's when it hit me that we put tons of chemicals on our skin (our biggest organ) every day, and those chemicals sink in. Right then and there, I decided that I'd never use store-bought, chemical-filled soaps ever again. I started by buying natural soaps, but soon decided that I could make them and be happier with my scent choices and ingredients.

FS: How did you learn to make it?

Iris: A lot of research. I bought quite a few books, and went from there. My base recipe was taken from one of the books (The Natural Soap Book: Making Herbal and Vegetable-Based Soaps, by Susan Miller Cavitch), but I've since tweaked it so it makes a soap I like better.

FS: Your website says you use the "cold process". What is this mysterious method and how does it differ from other ways of making soap?

Iris: There are various ways to make soap. All of them are explained very well here: http://www.teachsoap.com/soapmakingmethods.html. I prefer the cold process method because it has more versatility, and can produce the type of soap that I love.

FS: What's the difference between your product and the stuff on supermarket shelves?

Iris: Well, for starters, mine is actually a SOAP. Most of what's on supermarket shelves are technically detergents. They have preservative chemicals and they tend to be more harsh. My soap is made to be gentle and moisturizing. I've also noticed that the scents I use in my soap are nice and strong while you're using it, but once you're dry, it tends to fade away. I think that's a lot better because I don't necessarily want to smell like my soap all day long...much less taste it when a piece of chocolate melts on my finger.

FS: How can folks buy your soaps?

Iris: Go to my website! It's www.ladyfoxsoaps.com. I use PayPal, which accepts PayPal accounts, credit cards, and automatic bank withdrawals. Come, browse, and contact me if you have any questions!



So how does soap clean your biggest organ (ahem)? If you follow the link above describing the cold process, you discover that soap is made by combining a fatty acid with an alkali. I'll let Uncle Cecil take it from here:

This compound has two vital components--a water insoluble (hydrophobic) part, consisting of a fatty acid or a long-chain carbon group, and a water soluble (hydrophilic) part, generally an alkali metal. The hydrophobic part attaches to the fabric or dirt, the hydrophilic part snuggles up to the water. The result is that you force an electrically polar wedge of soap and water between the fabric and the dirt. The slime is then removed by mechanical action--"scrubbing," to put it in layman's terms.

Presumably you can replace fabric above with skin. And what does she mean the stuff in supermarkets is mostly detergents and not soap? Well, both soaps and detergents are surfactants which means that they reduce the surface tension of water so that the water molecules spread out instead of clinging to one another. Surfactants also help loosen dirt and suspend it in solution until you rinse it all away. The difference is, generally speaking, that detergents replace the fatty acids with petrochemicals that have similar hydrophobic properties and other chemicals such as sulfuric acid are used to make the hydrophilic component.