Ingredients Glossary

A pile of finely ground black powder on a white surface.

Activated Charcoal

One of the custom vegan soap ingredients you can add to your handmade soap. It’s especially good for gentle exfoliation and in facial soaps for oily skin. Besides being deeply cleansing and reducing the size of your pores, it gives the soap a stunning dark color.

Amber glass dropper bottle with shadow patterns.

Castor Oil

Castor oil is an oil unlike any other. Pressed from the seeds of the castor plant, it adds lather and a silky finish to any handmade soap. Even better, it’s a humectant, which means it will draw moisture to your skin as you use it. Full of fatty acids and antioxidants, it’s an excellent additive to soaps for dry, mature, and damaged skin types.

Opened cocoa pod showing white cocoa beans inside.

Cocoa Butter

We’re not sure who wouldn’t love cocoa butter! In handmade soap, cocoa butter is one of our custom vegan soap ingredients that conditions your skin and helps it retain moisture. As a bonus, it’s one of the best natural ingredients to help harden up handmade soaps.

Coconut Milk

Not surprisingly, this is one of our favorite coconut milk soap ingredients to add to handmade soap! Besides being delicious - in OTHER preparations (please don’t eat the soap) - it adds a creamy, luxurious feel to handmade soaps. Coconut milk combines many of the benefits of coconut oil with the nourishing benefits of fatty acids - which are great for all skin types, including damaged and aging skin. Plus, it provides similar benefits to other milks in soap-like sugars, vitamins, and proteins. In short, at Coconut Cream Soaps, we just can’t say enough about coconut milk in artisan soaps.

A clear bottle labeled PURECOCO with green coconuts on the label.

Coconut Oil

We celebrate all things coconut here and that includes coconut oil! This oil is the powerhouse behind getting your skin really clean; plus it makes great bubbles - and we like those! Still, it’s SO good at cutting gunk on your skin, it can dry you out. We love it at Coconut Cream Soaps, but we use it sparingly in our handmade soap to keep your skin soft and moisturized.

Hand holding a bottle of essential oil with flowers in the background.

Essential Oils

At Coconut Cream Soaps, we use the best essential oils we can source, most often blended with natural fragrances as fixatives, to gently scent your handmade soap and pamper your skin.

Many floral essences are made only using flower petals and no other parts of the plant. It can take 10,000 flowers to create a gram of essential oil. Unlike vegetable oils which are thick and viscous, essential oils are thinner, sometimes appearing as thin as water. They are not quite that thin, and most are not water-soluble. When cared for well (stored in colored glass bottles, tightly sealed in a cool, dry place), essential oils and blends can have a shelf life of up to five years.

A bowl filled with vibrant green matcha powder on a pink surface.

Matcha Green Tea Powder

A truly potent addition to our list of custom vegan soap ingredients, green tea powder is ideal in soaps made for mature or damaged skin. It adds antioxidants to protect your skin and encourage healing. Plus, it’s a natural skin softener.

Black bowl filled with white powder against a dark background.

Kaolin Clay

Much like activated charcoal, kaolin clay is one of our helpful custom vegan soap ingredients that you can add to your handmade soap to absorb oil on your skin. As an added bonus, it’s great for shaving soap and helps scents last longer.

Three artisanal soap bars with natural ingredients.

Lye

That’s right! Without lye, you don’t really have soap. At Coconut Cream Soaps, our handmade soap bars are created with sodium hydroxide which is necessary for the saponification process. That’s the process that turns all those great oils and fats in this glossary into actual, soapy, soap. And yes, it’s true that lye on its own is caustic (basic) and should be handled with care, but once it gets turned into an entire batch of soap, the pH balances out so it’s totally safe for your skin.

A dropper releasing liquid into a small brown glass bottle.

Natural Fragrances

The scents of Essential Oils are notorious for not lasting very long in handmade soaps. Fortunately, there are plenty of completely natural, plant-based additives that smell great and help the essential oil blends in your soaps last longer. One of these is benzoin, a resin with a soft scent reminiscent of vanilla, which, when diluted in a carrier oil and added to the essential oil blend, helps the aroma stay shelf-stable in your soap for up to 12 months.

Olive Oil

You’re probably already familiar with all the great things olive oil has going for it. Full of fatty acids and antioxidants, it’s yet another of our favorite coconut milk soap ingredients that clean your pores gently, soothes damage and inflammation, and encourages your skin to heal. It’s even a great moisturizer - which is why we include it in every bar of Coconut Cream Soap!

Two small bottles with natural remedies on a wooden table.

Rice Bran Oil

Besides Coconut Milk, Rice Bran Oil is one of our favorite custom vegan soap ingredients in Coconut Cream Soaps. This often-overlooked oil is rich in so many skin-nourishing components including vitamin E, antioxidants, and gamma-oryzanol; it’s an oil that is a must-have for any skin type and is in every bar of Coconut Cream Soap

Close-up of brown almonds piled together.

Sweet Almond Oil

This protein-rich oil is full of glucosides, minerals, and a whole slew of vitamins - including A and E. It’s a natural choice for our handmade soaps because it soothes inflammation and burns, fights itching, and protects your skin.

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