Why Re-Mill?
You may notice that we have very few first-run soaps in our catalog. Almost all of our soap products which are not french-milled are unscented, plain soaps for people with sensitive skin. All of the scented, moisturizing, colored, decorative soaps have been french-milled. Why is that? Isn't re-milling soap more work? Yep. But it is well worth it, allowing us to offer you a better product, and often at a better price, too.
French-Milled Lye Soap
French Milling is the process of taking first run soap and grating it down to be processed again. This is the stage where it is best to add scents, coloring, and fancy molded shapes. The lye has finished reacting so it will not interfere with the new additives. French milled soap is more consistent since pockets of alkali in the original soap are combined with any leftover pockets of oil and cancel out. After re-milling, the soap cures for another 4-6 weeks.
There are a couple reasons we bother to go through this process:
- Lye is a caustic, reactive chemical. When you are making raw soap, the lye doesn't just want to react with the fats and oils, it wants to react to everything you add to the soap: scents, colors, special moisturizers, flower petals.
- When you have more than one type of oil in a soap, say, olive oil, beeswax, and shea butter, you can't tell the lye which oils you want it to turn into soap and which ones to leave around to moisturize your skin. It eats what it wants and leaves what it doesn't.
What this means is that when you make a pear-scented soap with shea butter, you have to add a lot of pear scent and a lot of shea butter to make sure that just some of it will survive the lye reaction to be in your final bar, you can't control how much that will be, and you can't keep the lye from changing the scent or the color or other things in various odd ways. You can play with various recipes and find ones that work well 99% of the time, but it is so much easier, more consistent, better quality to just avoid the issue in the first place.
We make a plain, high quality soap the first time around and let the lye have its way, let it finish reacting completely. This gives us a great product for the people who have sensitive skin and cannot handle colors, scents, and additives. Then we use these plain soaps as a base to create.
French Mill Quality
This gives us some interesting opportunities. For instance, many vendors make goats milk soaps in various forms. Goats milk is mild and moisturizing, creating a very nice skin soap. Problem: it also makes a somewhat soft soap so the bars do not last as long. You have to use many pounds of goats milk just to have a few ounces of leftover moisturizer in your bars.
However, if you use a good, hard, mild soap like our castile as a base, grate it down, add a few ounces of goats milk, some other special ingredients, and re-mill, you get the best of both worlds: a long-lasting, hard bar with the moisturizing quality of goats milk. The lye has already done its work, so all of the moisturizer that gets added stays in the bar. Some more work for us, but better quality and we do not have to sell it at a premium: better for you.
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