My Soap Journey and the Necessity for Little Owl Soap

We're Jen and Dave of Little Owl Soap. It's Jen, here, the one who is completely obsessed with making soap.
In 2000, I decided to make my Christmas presents for family and friends. My only problem was that I didn't know what to make. So I turned to the marvelous interweb and did a lot of clicking around. Eventually, I came across soapmaking websites. The more I learned, the more excited I became about "cold process" soapmaking. The only problem was that it looked fairly complicated and required a bit of equipment -- like a digital scale and a tall stainless steel pot and a wooden mold -- I didn't have in my college apartment. It was all too soon to jump into this for Christmas presents.

So I made a wish list of all the equipment I would need, and I settled on making melt-and-pour soaps for the holiday. Melt and pour soapmaking is the easiest and safest of all the soapmaking arts. At its simplest, all you have to do is find a good glycerin soap base, melt it in a microwave-safe container, add fragrance and colorant, pour into a plastic soap mold, and pop the bars out when cold. Instant customized soap!

But I couldn't stop there. The call of cold process soapmaking was too strong. Cold process soap is made by mixing fatty acids (oils) with water and sodium hydroxide (lye), which triggers the saponification process. On its own, lye is a caustic substance, but when combined with the correct amount of water and oils, it creates an entirely new substance: soap. It's pure chemistry, and I became entirely fascinated by it. Not to mention, it seemed pretty hardcore to mention to people that I had to wear safety goggles and chemical-resistant gloves for my hobby!

So for a few years, I made cold process bar soap, then slowly, slowly, I began to lose my preference for bar soap and turned to body wash. I stopped making my own soap, and I began purchasing body wash.

In October 2008, I read the ingredient list on a bottle of body wash I had purchased at the store. I could barely pronounce the dozens of words. And when I Googled some of the words, I was a little disturbed. Body wash, I learned, wasn't really "soap." I thought, "There has to be a better way... Why should I be covering my body every day with dozens of unnatural sufactants when I could be covered in suds made from as little as three natural ingredients?" At that moment, I knew I had to learn how to make liquid soap.

After a crash course in "hot process" soapmaking and working with potassium hydroxide instead of sodium hydroxide, I made my first batch of liquid soap. And it worked! So I kept making more... and more... and more... My husband and I couldn't use it as fast as I was making it. I had an entire closet shelf filled with 16 fluid ounce bottles of my homemade body wash. I knew at that moment that I had no choice: I needed to open an Etsy store. But what to name it...?

(to be continued)