The First Time

For the past few weeks, I had been on vacation and travelling. I stayed at Boracay, Philippines for just under two weeks and discovered a local shop that sells handmade soaps among other neat stuff. I figured I should get some to try it out so I bought a small Tea Tree soap. It was a small bar so that I can try the other ones when I finished with it. I really liked that after using it, my skin didn't feel dry at all. On the contrary, it felt very moisturized. The only thing was that the little specks tea tree in the soap was a little rough on the skin when using the soap

It was a small bar so it only lasted for about 4 days. After which, I bought two more bars: Noni and Seaweed. The noni bar was very rich and creamy and I really like the lather. The seaweed bar was like a medium between the noni and the tea tree. It's too bad I have very limited luggage weight/space so I couldn't buy more to bring home. When I got to Chicago, I used the Bath and Body Works hand soap and it made my hands extremely dry. I'm not sure this is all due to the soap, or it might have been the water or the cold weather. Either way, it confirms that I will be switching to using handmade soaps. I'm not making my own (yet) but I will definitely buy them when I see them.

The Soap-Making Research

I did some preliminary research on Homemade Soaps and came up with some questions/topics that I want to do some more thorough research:

- Homemade Soap vs. Commercially Purchased Soap

- Soap Making Processes (Cold Process vs. Hot Processes)

- Chemical Reactions in these processes

- Face Soap vs Body Soap vs Baby Soap

- Main Ingredients and Optional Ingredients

- Storage: How and how long

- Other Equipments/Tools

I found a lot of blogs about these topics which gave me very good insights but I also want to find some credible information via various books and scholarly articles. The problem though, is that many of the articles I found require paid membership to access (ㅠ.ㅠ)

A Glimpse of an Idea

Yesterday, I met up with a girl whom I met with briefly once before to sell my mini fondue pot. At that time, we "clicked" instantly and had meant to meet up again just to hang out. However, I was preoccupied with packing up my life in South Korea and getting ready to move back to Canada, and she was also busy with moving and opening her own shop. We never did set up a time to have coffee, until I made another post on Facebook to give away some random household things. I got a message from her, and we decided to get coffee together and I can give her my stuff as well as visit her shop.

We talked about a lot of random things, one of which was about her shop and what she makes. She wanted to use soap and related products that are made from natural ingredients and not commercial products that may actually be detergents or that may contain "extra" ingredients. After coffee, we went to her shop and once I stepped in, I was pleasantly captivated by the mixture of soothing aromas from all the different soap bars. She also showed me her work station where she had even more racks of soap that are curing. Seeing all this reminded me that recently I had stumbled upon some youtube videos on making your own lip balm and such and I thought this would be a neat hobby project.