"Hi, my name is Freya.
My mum is one of the goats that provides the fresh milk for your soap."
In making our soap we're very careful with our choice of ingredients.
The basis of our soap recipe is natural vegetable oils and lashings of our own goats milk.
By law we have to list all our ingredients in INCI format, basically, in Latin, which is not very helpful, so here's a list of the ingredients we use to make our soap, translated into plain English.
In our scented bars we also use standard cosmetic colours and perfumes.
We do not test any of our products on animals.
There's nothing wrong with animal fats being used in soapmaking, lots of people do it, especially in commercial large scale soap making, but it's something we don't do. If you're concerned about it, next time you buy a bar of soap in the supermarket, read the label and look for 'Tallow' or 'Sodium Tallowate'; This is animal fat; Most likely rendered cows.
The BBC broadcast a TV programme highlighting the use of tallow in products such as soap. The second episode of "Kill It, Cut It, Use It" with Julia Bradbury, featured sheep and the uses to which their byproducts are put. In this case it was about rendered sheep tallow and it's use in soap and detergents.
If you're in a shop looking for soap you might want to check that the word 'soap' is actually used on the product you've picked up. I know it sounds silly but not all bars offered for sale are in fact soap. There are products on the supermarket shelves that look like soap but if you check carefully you'll see that they call themselves 'cleansing bars', 'body bars' etc. etc. Fair enough I suppose but watch out if you think you're buying soap. These alternatives might get you clean but they're probably composed of artificial chemicals rather than naturally occuring oils.
You may have seen talk recently about using palm oil in soap. It's widely used in commercial and handmade soaps because it works so well. The worry was that rainforests were being cut down to plant palm trees for oil. However, when we use palm oil we only use organic certified oil. It costs us more but we can be sure that no trees have been chopped down just to supply oil for our soap.
We've seen people selling products described as goats milk soap and been dismayed by the list of ingredients, so when you're buying goats milk soap we recommend you ask a few simple questions.
If the answer to all these is positive, you're probably talking to us. :-)
If I were you I'd check the ingredients listed on the label. If the seller describes their soap as 'natural' but you see chemicals such as 'Sodium lauryl sulphate' listed on the label then I'd look to get your soap elsewhere.
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New Postage Rates
Thanks to the Royal Mail, it's now cheaper than ever to buy several bars at once!
To take best advantage of the change buy 5 bars and you'll save 11% on postage
Our soap is vegetarian and made in the old-fashioned way using the 'cold process'.
Our soap is handmade from scratch from natural ingredients.
We do NOT use bought-in 'melt and pour' mixes that produce inferior 'instant' soap bars.
We do NOT use bought-in powdered goats milk.
The fresh goats milk we use comes from our own herd of rare-breed Golden Guernseys that graze on the rural pastures of Herefordshire. You can find out more about them on the Bluehills Herd web site.
For more information on Golden Guernsey Goats why not visit the "Golden Goats" web site.
For more information about buying and keeping goats check out Goat Breeds in the UK