Simply put, soap is the result of combining an acid with an alkali. The alkali used to make a bar of soap is lye (aka caustic soda, aka sodium hydroxide) and the acid is any oil (coconut oil, olive oil, shea butter etc). Oil + Lye = Glycerine + Soap. This chemical reaction is called saponification. All the lye is transformed into soap during the process, so none remains in the final bar. Once made, the bars cure and dry out for 3-4 weeks before they're ready to use.

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How Does Soap Work? A molecule of soap is roughly sausage-shaped; one end loves water and the other loves dirt/grease. So when you mix soap and water and massage it onto your skin, the soap grabs onto the water and the dirt. When you rinse the soap off, the dirt goes too. It’s so simple – we don't need masses of chemicals to do the same job!

Glycerine: Glycerine is a naturally-occurring substance in real soap. It is a wonderful thing for skin; it is deeply moisturising, nourishing and is an excellent skin softener. But did you know that many commercial soap manufacturers actually extract the glycerine from their soap so they can make lots of money selling it on to the cosmetics industry? They then have to stuff their soap with other (cheaper) ingredients to make the soap sellable again - sometimes even putting glycerine back in, which just sounds crazy to me!

You can make soap with any oils (animal or vegetable – my soaps are 100% vegetarian and all but one are vegan), but since they all have different properties and qualities, getting the right blend is where the skill comes in. For example, coconut oil is an amazing cleanser, creates great lather and a good hard bar of soap, but it’s far too drying to be used on its own. On the other hand, sunflower oil on its own would make a very soft bar of soap that probably wouldn’t last five minutes! Some oils produce bubbly lather, some will make the lather more creamy. (One thing I must mention here – properly-made natural soap lathers beautifully! Some people I’ve spoken to seem to assume that if you ditch the SLS you also have to say goodbye to a good lather. That simply isn’t true!)

Then there’s additional ingredients such as fragrances, colourants and botanicals. If you have very sensitive skin, even a natural essential oil fragrance might irritate, so a soap free from any fragrances or colours is the one for you (try my Pure and Simple Soap or my Fragrance/Colour Free Shampoo) .

You can make natural soap using two methods - hot process and cold process. Hot process uses heat to speed up saponification and produces a rustic-looking bar. All my soaps are made completely from scratch using the cold process method, which uses no extra heating and therefore the essential oil fragrances are better retained. Cold process soap looks smooth and refined in comparison to hot process.

Fragrances: Many commercial soaps use artificial fragrances – a cocktail of chemicals could be hiding behind that single word “Parfum”. Also, “nature-identical” fragrances are not natural - they’ve been made in a laboratory and for that reason I do not include them in my soap. I only use sustainably-sourced pure essential oils.

Colourants: There are a lot of very colourful handmade soaps on the market. They can look amazing, but they’re made with synthetic pigments such as oxides and ultramarines. I use only 100% natural botanicals to produce the subtle colours in my soaps: powdered lemon peel for yellow, paprika for orange, alkanet root for lilac/purple, madder root for shades of pink and green from powdered nettle leaves. It’s so much more fun than buying a packet of ci74160 (phthalocyanine blue) or ci77019, ci77891, ci77491, ci77742 and ci77861 (pink mica pigment)! I just don’t need to use these manufactured pigments to make a luxurious and beautiful bar of soap. So they’re out.

Botanicals: In addition to the above natural botanical colourants, I also use activated charcoal and kaolin clay, which both help to draw out impurities from problem skin. Kaolin also gives a lovely silky feel (called "slip" in the trade) to a bar of soap, making it an ideal ingredient in my Shaving Soap Bars. Botanicals can also help anchor the fragrance in a soap, making it last longer.

I started using 100% natural soap back in 2016 because I was fed up with having dry, itchy skin - due in no small part, I discovered, to the ingredients in the commercial soaps, shower gels and shampoos I'd been using. Two of the most common culprits are sodium lauryl sulphate (SLS) and sodium laureth sulphate (SLES). Both are surfactants, which mean they create a synthetic cleansing foam which lifts dirt. Unfortunately, both are also known skin irritants. As well as these, many commercial products contain palm oil (so-called sustainable or not, I still don't want to use it), synthetic colours (one well-known commercial brand uses 6 just to make their bar "ivory"!!), talc (which I believe is used as a bulking agent!) - and some still use the animal fat tallow! Whether or not some of these ingredients are harmful, all of them are unnecessary.

So I sourced some natural soaps and shampoo bars containing as few unnecessary ingredients as possible and noticed the difference straight away - my skin had never felt so soft and my scalp didn't itch! However, there weren't that many natural brands available back then and many still contained ingredients I wasn't entirely happy about putting on my skin.

So I decided to make my own - complete control over every single ingredient! After lots of experimenting, I settled on a base recipe of just five plant oils (coconut, olive, almond, shea butter and apricot) for my body soaps and six for my shampoos (coconut, olive, almond, castor, cocoa butter and shea butter). Seriously, you don't need anything else. The big corporations use cheap ingredients because their priority is profit - not the health of your skin.

100% natural oils and botanicals can produce soap which is really effective and gentle with loads of lather - you don't need anything else!

No. Nope. No way, never.

Palm oil is bad news, I think we all know that by now. From an ethical perspective, I try to avoid buying anything containing palm oil (which is really hard because it's everywhere). As far as soapmaking is concerned, there are so many wonderful oils with beneficial qualities to choose from that don't harm the planet. The only thing palm oil brings to a soap recipe is that it's really really cheap, meaning manufacturers can make huge profits - but at a devastating cost to the planet.

As Rainforest Rescue says, “Palm oil is literally everywhere – in our foods, cosmetics, cleaning products and fuels. It’s a source of huge profits for multinational corporations, while at the same time destroying the livelihoods of smallholders. Displacement of indigenous peoples, deforestation and loss of biodiversity are all consequences of our palm oil consumption. How could it come to this? And what can we do in everyday life to protect people and nature?”.

Well, I'm just one person, I can’t do very much, and I’m not naïve enough to think change is easy, but I can't forgive the palm oil industry for all the harm it's doing.

That’s why you won’t find any palm oil – so-called “sustainable” or otherwise - in my soap.

Some things are more important than profit.

Yes - I use trustworthy suppliers whose products are all ethically-sourced

Yes! Every ingredient I use is ethically sourced and cruelty free. The reason you won't see "Cruelty Free" or the bunny logo on my labelling is that I only sell to the UK market and, since animal testing is not legal in the UK, it's not necessary to put it on the label. In fact, not only is it unnecessary, it would actually be wrong because the law says you cannot claim something particular for your product that is in fact just complying with the law.

My body butters and lip balms are all Vegan. My soaps are all Vegan with the exception of the Honey, Frankincense & Oatmeal body bar, which is Vegetarian.

Hatton Handmade Soap products are 100% plastic free. But I go further than that.

All packaging - whether recyclable or not - needs to be manufactured (paper and envelopes may be made from trees but they don't grow on them!). That uses resources such as water and electricity. So I keep all my packaging to a minimum.

My soaps are wrapped in a simple paper band. My body butter and lip balm containers are 100% aluminium - one of the easiest and cheapest materials to recycle. The labels on the tins are made from recycled and recyclable paper. I post out online orders either in 100% recyclable Green Jiffy bags or recyclable cardboard boxes sealed with eco-friendly tape.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle!

When you place your order, you can choose from Royal Mail Tracked 24 or Tracked 48 small parcel post. If your order totals £40 or more you get Tracked 24 shipping free! If you live nearby you are also welcome to arrange to collect your order from me, in Market Harborough, Leicestershire.

I will always aim to get your order posted out the same day, if possible - next working day at the latest (unless I'm on holiday!) You'll get an automated email acknowledging receipt of your order, then I'll email you with the tracking info when your parcel has been posted.

If it's urgent - a last minute gift, or you've run out of shampoo - message me, I'll do all I can to help.

If your order hasn't arrived by the expected delivery date, the first thing to do is check the tracking info, using the tracking number I will have sent you. It may be that your post person has left it with a neighbour or in your safe place. Sometimes they get things wrong and deliver to the wrong house, or put in the wrong safe place, or forget to leave a card - thankfully this is very rare though! It's more likely that your parcel is simply delayed.

Please let me know within 48 hours of the expected delivery date if your parcel hasn't arrived.

Keep me posted (no pun intended!) but if it hasn't turned up after 10 working days' delay (Saturdays are not counted as working days) then I can submit a claim.

Creating natural products is really important to me - but it's not always possible to be 100% natural and still create a product which works. My Household Soap would be 100% natural and very effective if I just used coconut oil - but it would be so drying it would ruin your hands. Adding aloe vera juice makes the soap usable, but the juice itself needs a preservative, namely citric acid, sodium benzoate and potassium sorbate. These 3 components together total just 0.03% of the final product.

All things considered, I truly believe using this 99.97% natural household soap instead of single-use plastic bottles of chemical-laden detergents is well worth the compromise of not being able to say it's 100% natural!

Short answer - No.

Apart from one stockist (Forage and Fill in Lincoln) I am no longer selling my soaps wholesale. Demand had got so high (about 800 bars a month - quite a lot for a tiny cottage industry!) that it was taking over my whole life and affecting my mental health too. So I've dialled it back and ditched wholesale to concentrate on the website, occasional craft fairs - and enjoying life!

Absolutely, yes! My shaving soaps are made with the same base recipe as my body soaps - it's simply the addition of kaolin clay which gives them extra "slip" and makes the lather extra creamy and therefore suitable for shaving.

If you like rich, creamy lather then you'll love these bars!