We are a couple of Filipino soapmakers who make and encourage the use of all-natural handcrafted soaps. We cannot see the reason for using synthetic soaps when all-natural bars can do the job so much better. Why use soaps made with sodium lauryl sulfate (SLS) when you can use soaps made from 100% pure food grade vegetable oils? Go ahead read your soap label and chances are your soap uses SLS.

Some soapmakers refer to soaps made with SLS and other cheap chemicals as detergents. They tend to strip away your skin’s natural oils leaving it dry and irritated. When you run a fingernail across your arm and you see that white streak of dry skin, that’s the commercial soap working.

We are here to give you a choice. We at Summer and Other Stories make soap using the cold-process method. We make them in log moulds we made ourselves and in small batches at a time. We use at least five vegetable oils, the kind you can find in the supermarket. We use a generous amount of real coconut milk which we believe is better at moisturizing than goat’s milk. (Goat’s milk when left out in the open for some time curdles into cheese; coconut milk turns to virgin coconut oil. A world of difference.) Our handcrafted soaps are also “superfatted”, that is we add a little more oil than necessary so they do not remove your skin’s natural oils. We use essential oils like lavender, jasmine, orange, and peppermint, among others, to scent our soaps while taking advantage of the therapeutic effects of these oils.

Many of our friends who have tried our soaps say they will never go back to using commercial soaps, as if they’ve developed an aversion for them. Maybe they were just pulling our legs so we can give them some more soaps. Maybe not. Why don’t you find out for yourselves? One bar at a time.