If you’ve looked through or shopped on our website you’ve probably seen the words “traditional soaps,” and maybe you’ve wondered what that means. Our traditional soaps are soaps that are made the old fashioned way – combining sodium hydroxide and water with oils. In my last post, I discussed the one ingredient that is absolutely necessary to have soap — lye. No lye, no soap.

Aside from lye, the next most important ingredients would be the oils. I generally use 5 basic oils and add other oils and butters according to the soap I’m making and the outcome I’m trying for. Today we will start with the basic oil found in almost every bar of soap I make – Olive oil.

Benefits

Starting with the practical side, Olive Oil is relative inexpensive and widely accessible – and can be found everywhere. And it is easily bought in larger quantities. I use the Refined, Grade A Olive Oil. It is usually a light gold color and will come closer to not discoloring my soap. It is slow to trace, or thicken up when combined with lye, so it gives me more time to work with my soap making the designs that we all love. It can be used in very high percentage of soap – even up to 100%. But none of this would matter if it were not good for your skin.

Olive oil is high in oleic acid, a fatty acid that occurs naturally in many animal and vegetable fats and is very beneficial to skin, especially aging skin. It is thought to act as an anti-inflammatory; stimulate wound healing; calm, balance, and repair skin; and may even help in conditions such as eczema and psoriasis. Therefore, olive oil acts to condition you skin like few other oils. It also acts as a humectant, drawing moisture to your skin.

Drawbacks

As I said previously, olive oil is the foundation to my soaps. The olive oil make up the majority of the oils I use in almost every batch. I have used it as up to 60% of my oils without issue. Although you can use olive oil as 100% of you soaping oils (traditionally called Castile soap), there are some issues that will arise.

First, it takes this soap a long time to cure – up to a year. Most of us are not patient enough to wait until next February to use a soap made today. I sometimes have a hard time waiting a month!

We all like our soap to lather. Although olive oil DOES lather, it is a very fine lather. Almost non-existent as you can see in the picture above. If you compare the two pictures above, you will see that the lather of the olive oil soap is not comparable to the combination oil soap (and I worked a lot harder to get the olive oil lather). I like lots of bubbles — LOTS of bubbles. Olive oil alone does not satisfy that need.

Finally, 100% olive oil soap tends to be somewhat ‘slimy.’ It doesn’t have that creamy, rich feel that I like from my soap. Slimy and sticky is not the feeling I want to feel or sell to you.

Conclusion

Olive oil, in my opinion, makes a good, solid foundation for the oil phase of almost any lye soap. To have the creamy, bubbly, luscious qualities I like it requires a little help. In future posts, we will discuss some of the oils that make the framework to build on this foundation. See you then!!