Last year, some users of Cha-no Shizuku soap, made by the Yuuka soap company in Japan, began to experience allergic reactions. Unfortunately, the government did not issue public warnings, despite the severity of the reactions, which included reduced blood pressure and difficulty breathing.

The company has now recalled 47 million bars of soap, as well as other products that contain the ingredient that caused the reactions. The ingredient is a hydrolized wheat extract called Glupal-19S, added to boost lather.

Cosmetic companies all over the world constantly experiment with exotic ingredients to ‘improve’ their soap. The result is shelves full of commercially-produced soap that cause allergic reactions and skin sensitivity in many people.

Unfortunately, for large companies the search for better soap is really the search for cheaper soap that still makes people feel clean. The soap is still made with cheap animal fats, sodium sulfates, and other chemical ingredients that result in an inferior soap that is made more attractive to customers by adding colors, scents, and other ingredients that can provoke allergic reactions.

Pure soap costs more to manufacture, but it cleans your skin without drying it, and without leaving a perfumed residue. The right mixture of plant-based oils, combined with a precise amount of lye, results in a mild, moisturizing bar of soap.

There has never been a better time to switch to Amore Soap: Pure, natural soap for pure, natural clean.

(News information from the Daily Nomiuri Online.)

Amore Soap will be attending the open house at My Serenity Spa in Niagara Falls.

The event happens on November 26. If you’re interested in attending, let me know, or contact Jodi at the spa for more information.

My Serenity Spa is located in southwest Niagara Falls, near Niagara Square Mall. They provide a wide range of healing, relaxation, and health-enhancing services.

If you need some serenity in your life, contact Jodi to see how she can help you, and be sure to like their Facebook page.

Ethical Ocean has announced another bonus just in time for Christmas shopping. From now on, all orders under $75 have a flat shipping rate. Over $75, shipping from Ethical Ocean is free!

On Ethical Ocean, you can order a pack of five bars of Pure Amore soap for $18. That’s a 10% discount off the regular price. This is not a limited time special; all Ethical Ocean orders have this permanent discount!

Spread pure, natural clean this Christmas. Order Pure Amore today!

Just in time for your Christmas shopping, Amore Soap has partnered with Ethical Ocean to bring you a five-bar gift set for $18.00.  That’s $2.00 less than buying five bars separately.

If you act now, you will get 50% off the regular price of the set: Five bars of Pure Amore soap for just $9.00! That’s even less than the price during our recent 50% off sale!

The catch: This deal is only available through Ethical Ocean. As you’re checking out, enter the following coupon code:

AMORESOAP-EO

About Ethical Ocean

Ethical Ocean features products that are environmentally and socially responsible. Sellers fill in information about the ethical claims of their products, which are reviewed by the administrators before the product is listed. Amore Soap’s claims are simple: We use no animal products, do not test on animals, and use only natural ingredients.

Ethical Ocean ships products worldwide, and can provide an accurate shipping rate for any destination. Browse through their other sellers to find ethically produced clothing, food products, and many other items.

Visit Amore Soap’s shop on Ethical Ocean.

Amore Soap is pleased to announce its first retail partner!

Shear Indulgence in Niagara Falls now carries Pure Amore hand and body soap. Clair, the owner of the salon, has introduced a variety of wellness products to add to the line of high quality hair care products she already sells. When I met her at the Bridges to Better Business seminar hosted by the city of Niagara Falls, Clair was happy to find a skin care product that would integrate nicely into her wellness area.

Shear Indulgence is a great place to get your hair done, whether you need a simple cut and style or advanced hair colouring. Give Clair a call at (289) 296-0532, or drop in at Shear Indulgence at 7116 McLeod Road in Niagara Falls, immediately east of the Cogeco building.

If you drop in this week, you’ll catch the tail end of our 50% off sale. That’s right; the discount isn’t just online. Clair has ten bars of Pure Amore priced at just $2.00 each. Drop in and get yours today!

Use the Google Map embedded below to find Shear Indulgence:

Amore Soap isn’t a publicly traded corporation. We’re a private company. In fact, we’re a sole proprietorship.

What does that mean in terms of ethics?

It means that we’re not required to make every business decision to maximize the dividends paid to shareholders. We don’t have a board of directors who can force us to ignore important issues in order to maximize profits in the next quarter.

No one controls Amore Soap but me, the owner. Of course, I listen to my wife when she gives me advice, but the final decisions are mine alone.

When I started Amore Soap, I wanted to create a responsible company, one that would make decisions with global issues taken into account. My choice of ingredients, packaging, process, delivery, and other factors is influenced by what I see as important global issues such as environmental and social awareness, responsibility, and sustainability.

Here are a few examples of our ethical practices:

• Ingredients. I currently do not use palm oil in Amore Soap, even though it has good skin conditioning properties. The global supply of palm oil is generally destructive, and results in massive deforestation in countries such as Indonesia and Malaysia, where mature hardwood forests are burned to make way for monoculture palm plantations.
• Packaging. The sleeves in which Amore Soap is packaged are printed on HP paper that is certified by the Sustainable Forestry Initiative. For large orders that will not fit in a padded envelope, I use boxes that I recover from my local grocery store.
• Water use. The water that I use in Amore Soap is tap water that has been filtered using a Brita pitcher. This eliminates the packaging that would result from buying purified water, and results in process water that is certainly pure enough for the product. When cleaning up, I use regular dish soap, never any harsh chemicals, and never antibacterial soap.
• Testing. We test Amore Soap on ourselves, never on animals. Of course, we’re not big enough to have an animal testing lab, but we wouldn’t use a new product on our Pekingese until we’ve confirmed that it’s mild and effective. We’re not even going to try to use Amore Soap to bathe our cat.

I’m currently investigating the potential for organic certification. Certification is probably far in the future, but as our balance sheet improves, I will do my best to introduce organic and fair trade ingredients to my soap.

Before the end of 2011, I plan to have a formal sustainability plan, laying out a road map toward eliminating any net negative environmental and social impact created by Amore Soap.

If you have any suggestions for other ways we can improve our sustainability and ethical practices, please comment below.

I’ve been testing a few bars of Pure Amore version 2, and I’ve decided it needs a little more tweaking. When I produced this week’s batch, I changed a few parts of the recipe to make the soap a little firmer, and a little better for skin moisturizing.

I’ve uploaded a photo essay of the soap making process to Google+. If you’re already on Google+, search for me by name, or search for Amore Soap. If you’re not on Google+, send me an e-mail and I’ll send you an invitation.

You can also see the photos on my Picasa Web Albums. Here are a couple of pictures from the album as a sample:

The lye solution is cloudy and hot right after mixing.

After standing, the solution has cleared and cooled slightly.

Stay tuned for a big sale announcement!

This article appears on Buy Right, my responsible products blog, as well as here on Soap Suds. If you want to learn more about environmental and social responsibility in consumer products, go to Buy Right to read more.

Why do you use soap?

The answer to this question seems obvious. You use soap to remove dirt and oil from your skin, leaving it feeling smooth and clean. You also use soap to help protect yourself from communicable diseases by killing harmful bacteria.

Because of the second reason, an antibacterial soap would seem to be a sensible choice. So why is there such a backlash against antibacterial soap and cleaning product among the scientific community?

Bacteria: our friends?

The controversy results from a general lack of understanding of the role of bacteria in life. Most people know that bacteria cause disease, but only those who have studied some biology know that pathogenic bacteria (those that cause disease in humans) represent only a tiny fraction of the species of bacteria on Earth.  The vast majority of bacteria have little or no effect on humans.

Aside from pathogenic and benign bacteria, there is a third group: beneficial bacteria. And within that group is a large number of species of essential bacteria. For example, you could not digest food without the thriving population of bacteria that live in your digestive system. To help keep your intestinal bacteria healthy, you eat probiotic foods such as yogurt.

Your digestive system is not the only place inhabited by beneficial bacteria. The number of bacteria that live on your skin outnumbers the number of cells in your body by at least ten to one, according to Faith, Madness, and Spontaneous Human Combustion: What Immunology Can Teach Us About Self-Perception. (Link goes to Amazon product page–highly recommended reading.) I’m not talking about that guy down the street who hasn’t showered in days (give him some Amore, someone!); I’m talking about a clean, healthy individual.

If it weren’t for the symbiotic bacteria that live on your skin, foreign bacteria, both benign and pathogenic, would take up residence. Stated simply,

The good bacteria that live on your skin protect you from the bad bacteria that could kill you.

When you use soap containing a strong antibacterial agent such as triclosan, you are killing not only the bad bacteria that may be on your skin, but the many of the essential bacteria that protect you. After washing your hands with antibacterial soap, the sweat and oils that naturally form on your skin provide a fertile new habitat for whatever bacteria are in your immediate environment.

Chances are, you haven’t sterilized yourself to the point where all of your essential bacteria are gone, but you’ve weakened their population enough that other bacteria will compete with them to establish a population on your skin. If you wash your entire body with antibacterial soap every day, you are providing a favorable environment for the growth of harmful bacteria.

Why does antibacterial soap exist?

The short answer is given in two words: medicine and money.

Triclosan is a biocide that was developed as a hospital scrub, according to a New York Times article on triclosan. It has been used since 1972, and is the active ingredient in many antibacterial products, including Microban, which infuses triclosan into solid products. (See the PAN Product Info page for Microban.)

According to the New York Times article, the US Food and Drug Administration first proposed regulating triclosan in 1972, and proposed removing it from scrubs and soaps in 1978. Anyone who follows the struggle between American government and American business should be able to see why the FDA’s review has not been completed, and their proposed ban has not been implemented.

Triclosan is a broad-spectrum biocide that works by disrupting the formation of fatty acids necessary to form cell membranes. This mechanism makes it very effective at destroying bacterial cells, unless they have some type of mechanism that gives them an immunity to this type of attack. Bacteria with such an immunity include Escherichia coli, Staphylococcus aureus, and Pseudomonas aeruginosa, all of which are common skin flora, but can be pathogenic.

Unfortunately, research has not yet demonstrated a conclusive link between triclosan and cancer (PAN lists triclosan as a possible human carcinogen) or endocrine disruption. However, it has been demonstrated that triclosan breaks down in the environment to form long-lived dioxins and other persistent environmental pollutants that are known endocrine disruptors.

No Antibacterial Amore

For all of the reasons above, Amore Soap will never produce an antibacterial soap using triclosan or any other artificial chemical. According to the Us FDA, antibacterial soaps are no more effective than regular soap. And given the reasons stated near the beginning of this article, it is harmful to kill a broad spectrum of skin flora.

Amore Soap leaves you clean, not sterilized. If you work in an infectious disease laboratory, you may need something stronger, but for daily personal use, Amore Soap is much better for your skin and your overall health than antibacterial soap.

There is some good news in the market for antibacterial products. Because of consumer demand, Colgate-Palmolive has replaced triclosan with lactic acid in its antibacterial dish soap. If Amore Soap ever considers making an antibacterial product, we’ll look at a natural solution such as this.

Recommended reading

I quoted a book earlier in this article: Faith, Madness, and Spontaneous Human Combustion: What Immunology Can Teach Us About Self-Perception. If you know a little about human anatomy, and how our systems work together, this book is a very interesting read. Click the text link to find the book on Amazon.com, or find it in your local library. After reading it, you’ll never think about the immune system the same way.

A research note

I tend to use Wikipedia as a source of basic research. Wikipedia can be a great place to start research, but you have to evaluate the articles carefully. An article that lists a lot of peer-reviewed scientific studies as references, and provides links that allow you to verify what is stated, is much more reliable than an article that quotes news articles, blogs, and sources that give you no way to verify them.

According to an article in Contactmusic.com, Kate Moss has been experimenting with natural soap ingredients from her garden after being given a few bars of home made soap by friends.

Now she wants to start her own brand of natural soap. It’s important to her that the ingredients be “fresh and natural”.

It’s good to see such a prominent celebrity take on the cause of natural skin care. On the other hand, Kate Moss’ favourite natural soap varieties might be a little different from Pure Amore. She apparently never leaves home without perfume, so she might prefer a scented soap. It’s hard to say, though. Pure Amore has a scent that results from the oils it’s made from, and all of the feedback on Pure Amore’s light scent so far has been very positive.

So how about it, Kate; care to try some Pure Amore?

The first regular batch of Pure Amore hand and body soap has finished curing, and is ready to ship! Order yours today on our product page.

It has been a busy week. I currently produce one batch of 25 bars of Pure Amore soap per week. Because of the timing of my first two batches, they both ‘matured’ this week; one on Monday, the other on Friday. The first batch consisted entirely of samples: a large number of 1/4-sized bars to send by mail to my first 50 Facebook fans, and a smaller number of 1/2-sized samples to give away locally.

Every batch will contain a few 1/2-sized samples. They’re the ends of each slab that I cut from the large block that comes from my mold, so they often have some interesting patterns on one face. The regular bars have two smooth faces because they’re cut by a knife, but they can have an interesting pattern on one end due to the low-speed churning that happens as the soap hardens in the mold.

The regular bars of soap are approximately 1 inch by 2 inches by 3 inches, and weigh about 100 grams. This figure isn’t exact, but I keep it pretty close. Length might vary by up to 1/4 inch, width by 1/8 inch, and thickness by 1/16 inch. Weight is within 10 grams either way. These aren’t mechanically mass-produced, but hand-poured and hand-cut, so there is a bit of variation.

Bonus for Niagara Residents

George Beckingham, Amore Soap

That’s me on the right. If you see me walking around Port Colborne, Niagara Falls, St. Catharines, or anywhere in the area, give me the code phrase “I love Pure Amore”.

If I have a sample bar on me, I’ll give you one! If I don’t, I’ll give you a business card. Send me your address and I’ll hand-deliver a sample of Pure Amore.

This is not a limited-time offer! From now on, I’ll make sure I have at least one 1/2-sized sample bar with me at all times. If you give me the code phrase, I’ll give you a sample. (One bar per customer.)

I’m going to be in St. Catharines about an hour after I finish writing this. Will you be the first to receive your sample for loving Pure Amore? If so, you might receive a full-sized bar instead of a sample bar.