Neem and Coconut Bathing Bar

Details

A saponified bar for normal to oily skin, for acne-prone skin and for humid weather, made from coconut, castor and rice bran oils with neem leaf extract at 2 percent and cold-pressed neem oil at 3 percent. The green, faintly bitter smell is the neem itself; there is no fragrance in it. Two things settle a bathing bar and the market states neither. The first is pH. A saponified soap cannot be made at skin pH, because soap is the salt of a fatty acid and it only exists in alkali, so every true soap sits between pH 9 and 10 and lifts the skin's own pH for an hour or two after a bath. This bar measures 9.6. Any bar that calls itself a soap and claims pH 5.5 is either not a soap or not telling you its pH, and the word gentle printed over a pH 10 bar is the oldest claim in the aisle. The second is total fatty matter. Indian labelling separates toilet soap under IS 285, where Grade 1 needs 76 percent TFM, from bathing bar under IS 2888, where the bar is allowed a great deal less fatty matter and a great deal more filler, and the reason so many premium-looking bars are called bathing bars is precisely that the name lets the fat come out. This one is named a bathing bar and is built to the toilet soap grade anyway: TFM 78 percent, tested per lot.

• Total fatty matter 78 percent, above the IS 285 Grade 1 minimum of 76 percent, tested per lot by the IS 285 method
• Measured pH 9.6 in a 1 percent aqueous solution, printed rather than hidden, because a true soap is alkaline and there is no way around it
• Free caustic alkali below 0.05 percent, which is the figure that separates a properly cured bar from one that stings
• Glycerine retained at 6.8 percent by assay. Industrial soap is made by saponifying, salting out the glycerine and selling it to the cosmetics trade, and the bar you are left with is the harsher for it
• Full INCI in descending order: Sodium Cocoate, Sodium Rice Branate, Aqua, Glycerin, Sodium Castorate, Melia Azadirachta Leaf Extract (2.0 percent), Melia Azadirachta Seed Oil (3.0 percent), Kaolin (1.5 percent), Sodium Chloride, Tocopherol
• No palm oil, no palm kernel oil and no tallow. That is a sourcing choice and it costs us hardness, which is why the bar is cured six weeks to get it back
• No fragrance of any kind, no essential oil, no dye, no EDTA and no triclosan
• Stamped at 105 g and cured down to 100 g plus or minus 2 g at packing, with moisture at 11 percent, so the weight on the wrap is the weight you buy rather than the weight it was when wet
• Honest trade-off, and it is the whole point of the pair: at pH 9.6 this bar will make dry, itchy or eczema-prone skin worse, not better. If your skin is dry or reacts easily, buy the Shea and Oat Bathing Bar instead, which is not a soap at all and sits at pH 5.5
• Second trade-off: a palm-free soap softens faster in standing water. Keep it on a draining dish out of the shower stream and it gives 45 to 55 washes; leave it in a puddle and it gives half that