Customer Support
admin@bar-baar.comMade in Belgium
At Barbaar, we make soap based on the cold process method.
We believe that crafted with care, our process celebrates the artistry of natural soapmaking, where chemistry meets nature to create nourishing and sustainable skincare essentials
Soap making is a wonderful feat of chemistry. Because we can start from scratch in building our recipes, it goes without saying that we only choose plant-based and natural ingredients to keep the quality of the end product as high as possible.
Soap is obtained through a chemical reaction between alkalis and fat. More specifically, it involves oils or butters (fat) and lye (alkalis). We only use plant-based and often organically produced fats, such as cold-pressed coconut oil or olive oil. Nowadays, lye is a mixture of sodium hydroxide and water. The addition of lye is necessary to convert these oils and butters into soap: also known as the saponification process.
Beforehand, we determine what kind of soap we want to obtain: creamy, degreasing, more suitable as shampoo, very foamy, rather a hard block, etc. For this, we choose oils and butters based on their properties. To take full advantage of the beneficial and nourishing properties of our chosen oils, we make a soap block with 'superfat'. This means that we incorporate more plant oils into the soap than the lye can saponify.
These oils are heated so that all oils and butters become liquid. When both the plant oils and the lye are at the right temperature, the lye is added to the oils. Very quickly, the clear contents of the fats turn into a smooth mass. This is also the moment when we add essential oils, clay, and other fine natural ingredients.
The liquid soap mass quickly hardens in the soap molds, and a few days later, the soap loaves can be removed from the molds. These are cut into pieces, stamped, and then left to mature for four to six weeks.During this period, the soaps further harden as the excess water evaporates. By standard superfatting our soap, we avoid lye in the final product and ensure that the soap is nicely cared for and does not dry out your skin.
A wonderfully nourishing byproduct of the saponification process is glycerin. Glycerin naturally forms during the saponification process, without the need for additives. In factory soap, the natural glycerin is often skimmed off and separately sold at high profit as an addition to other cosmetic products.
The industrial soap manufacturer will often add synthetic glycerin at the end of the production process, about 1% synthetic glycerin compared to the 6 to 7% natural glycerin that forms in the artisanal cold soap method.
There is no more natural reaction than the above piece of chemistry, and it is a beautiful method to incorporate only those ingredients into a soap block that we want. The cold process avoids very high temperatures, preserving the beneficial properties and effects of the ingredients. Finally, with this method, we do not need preservatives to keep the soap stable, and we can enjoy our creations for a long time!
