Shea and Oat Bathing Bar

Details

The bar for dry skin, winter skin, older skin and skin that reacts, and it is deliberately not a soap. Soap is the salt of a fatty acid and exists only in alkali, so a true soap sits at pH 9 to 10 and lifts the skin's own acid mantle for an hour or two after every bath. On dry or reactive skin that is what the itch is. The industry's soft answer is to superfat a soap, leaving some oil unsaponified so it feels richer, and it is worth knowing plainly that superfatting does not move the pH at all: a bar superfatted at 8 percent is still pH 9.7 and still alkaline. So this one is built the other way. It is a synthetic detergent bar, a syndet, cleansed by sodium cocoyl isethionate rather than by soap, buffered to pH 5.5, with shea butter at 8 percent and colloidal oat at 3 percent left in it. There is no soap in the bar, so it carries no total fatty matter figure, and any TFM number printed on a syndet is meaningless. The other cheat in this corner of the aisle is the combar, a bar sold on the syndet word that is mostly soap with a little isethionate added; the giveaway is the pH, which is why ours is printed.

• Syndet bar, not soap. Primary surfactant Sodium Cocoyl Isethionate at 42 percent, from coconut
• Measured pH 5.5 in a 1 percent aqueous solution, against pH 9.6 for our own neem soap bar, and the difference is the entire reason this bar exists
• Shea butter at 8.0 percent and colloidal oat kernel flour at 3.0 percent, both figures stated rather than implied by a picture on the wrap
• Full INCI in descending order: Sodium Cocoyl Isethionate (42.0 percent), Stearic Acid, Aqua, Butyrospermum Parkii Butter (8.0 percent), Sodium Isethionate, Glycerin (4.0 percent), Avena Sativa Kernel Flour (3.0 percent), Sodium Stearate, Cocamidopropyl Betaine, Sodium Chloride, Sodium Phytate, Tocopherol
• No fragrance at all, not even essential oil. Fragrance is the commonest single reason a wash makes dry skin worse, and an essential oil is a fragrance with a nicer name
• Palm-oil-free. The stearic acid is coconut-derived rather than the palm-derived stearic that is standard in this format, and that is a sourcing choice we pay for
• No soap, no tallow, no palm, no dye, no EDTA, no triclosan, no menthol
• Net weight 100 g plus or minus 2 g. A syndet bar is extruded and plodded rather than poured and cured, so its weight is stable from the day it is made and does not shrink on the shelf the way a fresh soap does
• Honest trade-off: at pH 5.5 with 42 percent isethionate this bar lathers creamily but not abundantly. It will not give you the tight squeaky-clean feeling, because that feeling is stripped skin
• Second trade-off: a syndet bar softens faster than a cured soap. Keep it on a draining dish. It gives 40 to 50 washes there and noticeably fewer in a puddle
• If your skin is oily or acne-prone, or you simply want a real soap, buy the Neem and Coconut Bathing Bar instead. It is a true soap at pH 9.6 and that suits oily skin