Most commercial soap is not really soap at all but a detergent bar that is more often than not harsh and drying. These soaps also contain a lot of chemicals like triclosan, sodium lauryl sulphate, sodium laureth sulphate, and other harmful synthetics. To see what we mean, go and ahead and inspect the ingredients of any mainstream soap you use! You’ll be surprised at the number of chemicals you’ll find. In contrast, BOH artisan soaps are made using cold-pressed oils, raw butters, essential oils, and herbs and clays in small, detailed batches, using the traditional cold-process technique. This superior method of making soap preserves the natural properties of herbs and oils. This ensures that your soap is truly chemical-free!

Again, most of the “handmade soaps” you find in stores aren’t really handmade at all. They produced using a premixed, commercially manufactured base in the form of soap flakes, noodles, or cubes. This is called the ‘melt-and-pour’ method in soap-making, as the base is melted, colours and fragrances are added for customization, and then the base is poured into a mould. This makes a good-looking soap but at the cost of safety. This is because the soap-maker has absolutely no control over the chemicals used in the base! At BoH, we make soap from scratch without commercial bases, using instead various veg oils that are much more effective in nourishing and moisturizing your skin.

Your soap should last for 20-30 washes if kept dry in between uses. You can make it last longer if you don’t hold it in the shower stream and if you keep it on a well-draining soap dish, not sitting in water. As far as shelf life goes, a bar will usually last about a year or two before the fragrance fades and the oils lose their nourishing properties. It's still good soap; it just won't smell as pretty. Some fragrances fade quicker than others, like citrus oils and lavender.

Glycerine makes our soaps softer than commercial soaps. It draws moisture out of the atmosphere to itself to leave your skin feeling incredibly smooth. This property of glycerine results in beads of water on the soap surface, a phenomenon called ‘sweating.’ Sweating is a sign of a good, moisturizing soap. We do not use any waxes to harden our soaps. Read on to learn how to make your soapy happyness last a long, long time!

Before use, keep your soap in a dry, cool, and well-ventilated spot out of direct sunlight. Don't store your soap in your bathroom before opening, even if that's where you'll use it eventually. The humidity will melt the glycerine, which will then evaporate, and we don't want that to happen. To prevent your soap from melting, keep it in a well-drained soap dish so it can dry between uses. You can also cut the bar into two and use a piece at a time, storing the other half in a dry place. Using a loofah helps to reduce the quantity of soap used per wash.

Maybe! Our soaps have natural skin-lightening ingredients like carrot juice, cucumber juice, and rice flour. These help lighten your skin but cannot completely eliminate tanning / pigmentation. To speed up the process, you may wish to use a homemade ubtan—find recipes in our Happyness Handbook!

Definitely! All our soaps are formulated to be gentle on facial skin. BoH products are gentle on delicate facial skin unlike commercial soaps that leave you with a dry, tight, and uncomfortable feeling. This happens because most of your store-bought soaps contain harsh synthetics, dyes, and fragrances. These chemicals stay on your skin even after your bath and create problems such as dry skin and allergies. If a BOH soap is not suitable for facial use, it will be specified on the product page.

Glycerin is a humectant, which is a substance that draws moisture from the air. Glycerine holds this moisture onto your skin and is responsible for that incredibly soft feel on using a handmade soap.

In soap-making, curing is the process where you let the cut soap sit out in the air for four to six weeks. During this time, there is a little of the lye and fat reaction, but mostly curing is important to let the soap dry. As the water evaporates, the soap becomes hard, and this adds a great deal to its longevity.

In its raw form, yes. However, the final soap bar contains no lye as it gets completely consumed in the saponification process, which takes 48 hours to complete. As a matter of fact, it isn’t possible to make any soap (be it handmade or commercial) without lye, and if someone tells you otherwise, they are either misinformed or not admitting the truth