My Soap is Your Soap. When I first started making soap in early 2000, I always had a plan to sell it.
Two years before, I was in the US Navy in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. My ship, the USS Frank Cable (AS40) was stationed in Guam, USA, but had a job in Yokosuka Japan. This is where my love for soap was born.
Japan is famous for its beauty and skincare products and I found out why while on liberty (A military term for "time off work") — I would go into the section of the city where there were open-air malls, wander around looking into various shops, Yen shops, clothing stores, stationery stores, books, and magazines stores — almost all these stores had a section for beauty and skincare. Little colorful soaps and creams in different shades of color and fragrances. I loved it. I'm not a girly girl, but I loved all these beauty products!
I loved all the Japanese products because they were fun and new, using exotic ingredients, such as ghassoul clay, and argan oil.
Some body washes have sweet rose otto absolute fragrance, formulated with rose extracts, but it also contains moisturizing ingredients including hyaluronic acid and jojoba seed oil.
However, in one shop, there was a set of twelve soaps in oval shapes, all in different pastel colors and floral fragrances that captured my senses. It was pricey, but I wanted it and there were worse things a US Navy sailor could spend her paycheck on! I bought and rushed back to my ship, and enjoyed these lovely little soaps that lasted me a long time — that was until I discovered handmade soap when my ship went back to Guam!
I discovered in a small shop in Guam that sold tourist t-shirts, surfboard wax, and a pure coconut oil soap with sea salt — the shop's owner made it in her kitchen. It was white and pale green, pretty, hard as a rock, and a lemongrass fragrance. I was intrigued with homemade soap like that was something I wanted to do too.
There weren't many places to learn to make handmade soap back in 1998, and no real Internet as it is today, so I learned from books until I left the Navy, got married and moved to Louisiana where I made my first bars of soap. Those first batches of soap were not what I hoped for, but eventually I formulated my soap recipe that I still use now. To me it's perfect, making a hard bar of handmade soap that has a creamy, bubbly quality that leaves skin feeling clean, but not drying.
That's my soap and it's yours if you want it. I thank you if you do because it means I can keep making soap with your purchase.
