Hidden Valley Farms Soap Company
We are very proud of our handmade soaps, they are made using the traditional cold process with top quality oils and ingredients. We are members of the handcrafted soap makers guild and we truly believe that when you treat yourself to a handmade soap bar, you are buying a high quality product that cannot be compared to the typical manufactured soap bar, which is often made of using many chemicals and animal fats. Perhaps one of the things that makes us a little different is the fun we have had creating so many different wrappers. You will see on our site that you can personalize your order by selecting a scent and a wrapper. Also at an additional cost, you can add a special message to the back of the wrapper or you can pick from our standard range. Whatever you choose, we are sure you will be delighted by the choice of scents and wrappers we have because we make very small batches at a time of around 90 bars. By making small quantities, this enables us to provide you with such a wide variety of fragrances. All the kettles we use to manufacture our soaps are hand-filled, mixed and blended by us. When you purchase from us, the soap is picked, hand-trimmed, and then hand-wrapped before shipping. This is a very labor intensive process but it is all part of making sure your soap is fresh and exactly as you require it.
The soap recipe of all of our handmade bath soaps features all natural vegetable oils and butters and herbs. No animal fats or animal testing. These natural soaps weigh in at over 4 ounces when fresh out of the batch at cutting time and cure out to a hard bar at about 3.4 ounces. They measure about 1 by 2 1/8 by 3 1/4 inches. Please note you should allow for variations, as they really are handmade soaps in every way.
Why choose handmade soaps over milled soaps? This is a very good question. One important reason is that when a soap is milled, it is formulated and mixed by machine and instead of forming this soap formula into a bar of soap, it is extruded into noodles and stored for rebatching. Then it goes through steel rollers which is called "milling" the soap. Before it can go through these rollers, the naturally formed glycerin, which is so good for the skin, is extracted. This glycerin is eventually bottled and retailed through drug stores. Handmade soap retains all this naturally occurring glycerin that is so vital for the lubrication of the skin. Another reason to use handmade soaps is the fact that soapmakers use very high grade of ingredients and usually don't use fillers or chemicals such as the controversial SLS surfactant.
Our soap recipe calls for many skin healing and moisturizing natural ingredients such as olive oil and shea butter, ingredients well known to aid the skin. We mix the recipe at low temperatures to preserve the herbals and natural butters and beautiful skin healing oils. Careful attention is given during the hand stirring of each batch of handcrafted soap and each different ingredient is carefully added at the precise moment to the mixture. Our soap recipe has been carefully formulated and fine tuned over many years to produce a very fine bar of soap high in lather, rich in moisturizing, and long lasting. We do hope you will enjoy our soaps as much as we enjoy making them.
