Simple Soaps

About Our Simple Soaps & The Creation Process 

At Forest Doe Botanicals we prefer the cold process method
of soap making so that we have full control over the ingredients that go into each of our handcrafted soaps. There are several methods for creating handcrafted soap including hot processed, melt and pour, and our personal healing favorite and most time consuming method of the three – the cold processed method of soap making.

We first purchase only the highest quality organic vegan ingredients available
through our local suppliers and our suppliers around the globe, and have these
ingredients shipped to our creation studio in Western Massachusetts.

These organic vegan ingredients include shea butter, coconut
oil, castor oil, extra virgin olive oil. We never use synthetic fragrance oils
or colors – only essential plant oils like lavender, peppermint, eucalyptus, sweet
orange, cedarwood, and rosemary essential oils to naturally scent our soaps and
enhance their healing properties. We seek out only natural organic vegan spices,
herbs, flowers, plants, clays, and other Earth-derived ingredients to color our
soaps and enrich their soothing quality such as cardamom, turmeric, rhubarb
powder, aloe vera powder, spirulina, calendula, chamomile, yarrow, rose hips,
and lavender petals.

Depending on the soap you purchase, the benefits of our Forest Doe Botanical soaps include gentle cleansing, moisturizing, hydrating, and clearing up irritated skin. Other benefits include calming the body, soothing the mind, invigorating low energy, and encourage you to claim a few moments of tender self-care during your cleansing routine.

 We precisely measure our ingredients to create recipes with natural healing benefits. We melt all the oils together, add the natural essential oils and botanicals, and blend with heated sodium hydroxide – a natural agent used in all soap making processes. These combined ingredients when blended together go through what is called the saponification process, and in its final form our soaps contain no detectable sodium hydroxide as all of the oils have converted to soap and glycerin creating our soap base – just pure simple beautiful soap. It’s such a fascinating science and time consuming
process to create our beautiful blends.

We typically make forty bars of soap in one creation session which takes both Missy and I up to 4 hours to make the soap, pour it into our molds, and clean up our creative-mess (aka the dishes). Then our soaps go in our home-made ‘soap-oven’ for 24 hours. After one full day we cut our soaps into forty 1 inch bars, stack them individually to cure on our shelves for 4 -6 weeks. Yes, 4 – 6 weeks. When our soaps are cured and are ready to use, we print out our own labels, apply the labels to each bar so that you know every organic vegan ingredient that you are putting on your skin. That’s when our soaps are ready to sell and use.

It’s quite a time-investment, a labor of love, and soooo worth the extra time and attention we put into every soap we create to give you a product that you can trust, a product that is both good for your body and good for our planet, and a product that is part of our Giving Program where we donate a portion of each purchase to organizations we love and support such as The Trevor Project, Skyland Animal Sanctuary, The Malala Fund, and The Nature Conservancy.

Thank you for supporting us, our local and global community, and your own tender-care through using our Forest Doe Botanicals. We appreciate you.

In gratitude, plant-love, and long slow breaths…

Kate Forest and Missy Doe