An artisan is a skilled craftsperson that creates products by hand. Their work is honed to a high degree of quality, distinctive in form, and often created in small batches. This means that soap created by an artisan has been crafted by skilled hands to be high in quality.
How does soap become high-quality?
High-quality body soaps are made by using great ingredients and a recipe that's formulated to be effective and gentle on skin. This is how I've designed the soap at Smithmade Essentials.
All the artisan soaps you can buy here are made with all-natural oils, fair trade butters, colorants and premium fragrances. Everything that goes into these soaps is sourced from suppliers that have a high standard for quality, fairness, and sustainability. From the ingredients to the packaging, I have been mindful about everything put into creating soaps that I can truly say lives up to the distinct quality you would expect of an artisan.
So what's the difference between artisan soap and "normal" soap?
Traditionally, the purpose of soap is to clean. Soap made for this purpose alone is practical and effective, but oh so boring. Soap helps lift grease and dirt which cleans but can leave the skin feeling dry. On top of this, sometimes detergents and other additives are used in soap to increase this cleaning power and may have the inevitable effect of giving the soap a harsh feel.
Smithmade artisan soaps have been crafted with oils that have been carefully chosen for their skin-friendly properties. They have been balanced so that when turned into soap they get the job done with great lather and bubbles, but no harshness. To further elevate my bars I enrich them all with shea butter. This not only locks in their gentle feel but it also adds the luxe attributes that shea butter is known for. These bars are then finished off with an array of colors and fragrances to upgrade the soap from being just a practical bar that gets the job done to a carefully designed olfactory experience looks great and feels great to use.
