Search Results

Making the switch is something that every single person will do differently. Each one of us is unique. From our personal experience, what we can offer you is one main piece of knowledge we have acquired: The key to going natural is understanding that the process is going to take time. Here are 5 tips to help get you started on your natural journey! 1. Don't Throw Everything Out: Of course you can switch to an all-natural products in one day. You can throw out every non-natural product you own… but I don’t feel that this is the way to do it. It’s similar to the idea of going on a crash diet in order to prep yourself for an upcoming party — it might work short term, but you’re likely to soon go back to the past ways. If you want to truly make a change to your lifestyle, do it slowly, one step at a time. 2. Replace products as you run out. Start by choosing one thing to switch. Once you’re comfortable with that, move on to switching out the next product that runs out. Body soap and shampoo are probably the first few items that you can replace. This way, your body can get used to each change one by one, you can slowly learn how your body reacts to different products — and alter them until you find what works best for you, and the change won’t be such a shock to you overall. 3. Buy in small sizes. This helps weed out the products that you don't like. Check for trial or travel sizes even if you have to buy them. Only splurge on full size products that you absolutely LOVE and know you will use. 4. Learn to read labels. Look past pretty bottles, ignore miraculous marketing claims and go directly to the ingredients! Just because a company says its “healthy,” “100 % natural,” “pure,” “botanical” or “organic” doesn’t mean that it actually is. 5. Learn how it is made. Once you get comfortable with the few new natural products that you have switched, you can start making tiny alterations to the products you’re using, tweaking ingredients to get them to be exactly how you want. Suddenly you’ll find yourself concocting your own unique creations that are formulated just for you. Where to buy natural handmade soap? We're a group of people trying our humbly best to contribute a tiny part to the nature and health. We have curated cold-process soap recipes made from plant-based ingredients and 100% pure essential oil. Choose from our range of cold-process soaps available. Learn to make handmade soap! Come say hello to us at our cosy studio! Get hands-on experience in our soap making classes. Learn to make natural soap from scratch at our Basic Cold-Process Soap Making class for all beginners. You can choose between making Liquid Soaps (Most Popular!) or Bar Soaps to start your soap making journey. You will get to learn the basic knowledge of CP soap making and natural ingredients, hands-on experience of making your own handcrafted soaps, useful tips for making CP soap such as the correct way of handling lye and making lye solution. Once you have learned the basic knowledge of soap making, you can progress on to other soap making classes. #MakeTheSwitch #allnatural #coldprocesssoaps #coldprocess #handmadesoap #madeinsg #plantbased #sugarandspicesg #soapworkshopsg #organic #skincare #wheretobuysoap #liquidsoap #taiseng

How to make lye Soap making in the woods can be almost automatic. Hardwood ashes are some of the best producers of lye. Add a bucket of rain water and some left-over cooking oil and you can easily brew up enough soap to clean everybody and everything. To make concentrated lye water you need to pour rainwater through cold ashes, hardwoods are the best. You will need a barrel or clay flowerpot with a hole at the bottom. Layer the bucket with gravel and straw to keep the ashes from falling straight through. This will help form a filter medium at the bottom of the bucket. Tightly pack your ashes on top of the straw. Make sure to leave a few inches at the top to hold the water. Next you need to set your bucket up so that the water can drip down through the ashes, out the hole in the bottom and into your stainless steel pot below. Heat the lye water If you have rainwater, heat it to boiling. You can use steam distilled water, but regular tap water has too much chlorine and minerals in it. Pour 1.5 litre of the boiling water over the ashes. Once that has seeped down, pour another 1.5 litre and wait 30 minutes before pouring another 1.5 litre into your bucket. Continue this step until you see brown lye water in your pot. You are done pouring as soon as you have around 3 litres of brown lye water in the pot below your ash bucket. The used ashes should be discarded, you can put them in a compost bin to break down. If you need more lye water, repeat the process with fresh water and ashes. Ten cups of ashes and 3 litres of rainwater will make an average strength lye, so there’s no need to test the strength. The finished soap will vary a little in strength, but you can use slightly stronger soap for laundry, and slightly weaker as a bath soap if it varies too much. Concentrate the lye After extracting the brown lye water the next step is to boil it until the lye is more concentrated. When starting with ten cups of ashes, you should boil the brown lye water until you have just 3/8ths of a cup concentrated lye water. This should take three to four hours. Once you get down to about a quart of concentrated lye water in the pot you should watch it carefully so as to not boil off all your water. If you do go below 3/8ths of a cup, carefully add enough rain water to bring it to 3/8ths. Be very, very careful with the lye! Wear gloves, and be super careful not to splash or spill! If the above method is too much of a hassle, book our Cold Process Soap DIY Workshop where you can buy lye from us and rent our facilities to make your own soap at our studio. If you are new to DIY soap making, no worries, join our Basic Cold Process Soap Making Class and learn the essential knowledge of making your own soap from scratch. Today, DIY soap makers are using sodium hydroxide and potassium hydroxide (both are called lye as well) to make bar soap and liquid soap, respectively. These two materials are used for the reasons of convenience and accuracy of lye concentration. The second reason determines the success rate of soap making because different oil requires different amount of lye to turn into soap completely. You can learn the calculation of lye for successful soap making in our Advanced Cold Process Soap Making Class. What is Lye? Where to buy Lye in Singapore? Available Soap Making Classes

Palm oil is a form of edible vegetable oil obtained from the fruit of the African oil palm tree. It is believed to have recently eclipsed soybean oil to become the world's most widely produced edible oil. It is used in most processed food, cosmetic and household products. More recently it is being touted as a biofuel - despite evidence that the use of palm-oil-based diesel actually increases greenhouse emissions. In non-food products like soaps and detergents, the list includes elaeis guineensis, sodium lauryl sulphate, cetyl alcohol, stearic acid, isopropyl and other palmitates, steareth-2, steareth-20 and fatty alcohol sulphates - all of which may be derived from palm oil. Additives and agents such as emulsifiers (E471 is a common one), while only a small component of the overall product, can also be derived from palm oil. Other names to keep an eye out for that could be or be derived from palm oil are cocoa butter equivalent (CBE), cocoa butter substitute (CBS), palm olein and palm stearins. Most of the processed food contains palm oil. If the saturated fat content is about 50%, there is a good chance that the vegetable oil will in fact be palm oil. Another thing to watch out for on the ingredients list is margarine. If the product contains margarine, it is highly likely that the margarine will have been derived from palm oil. Why is it so bad? With palm oil plantations expanding into regions on the planet that are of the most bio-diverse ecosystems, including rain forests, grasslands and peat swamps in South America, Southeast Asia, the Pacific and Africa, areas home to millions of plant and animal species, including highly endangered orang-utans, clouded leopards, and sun bears.The rapidly expanding palm oil trade, is the single greatest threat facing orang-utans today. Rain forests are being cleared at the rate of 300 football fields per hour to make way for oil palm plantations. While there are millions of hectares of degraded land that could be used for plantations, many oil palm companies choose to instead use rain forest land to gain additional profits by logging the timber first. Palm oil companies also frequently use uncontrolled burning to clear the land, resulting in thousands of orang-utans being burned to death. Those that survive have nowhere to live and nothing left to eat. So there you have it… While palm oil itself is not 'bad for you', the massive destruction caused by humans who destroy natural forests to plant huge palm oil plantations, have no consideration for environment and the rest of its inhabitants. So how do we make an informed choice about whether we need to use palm oil for everything from cooking to machine lubricant? … Be an ethical and responsible consumer. #Soap

What’s the difference between Melt & Pour (M&P) and Cold Process (CP) soap? Melt and pour utilizes a pre-made soap base that is ready to use as is. Literally, you could take the melt and pour block, as-is, get in the shower and lather away! Cold process soap making is the act of mixing fixed oils (common oils include olive, coconut and palm) with an alkali (sodium hydroxide, commonly known as lye). The result is a chemical process called saponification, where the composition of the oils change with the help of the lye to create a bar of soap. With M&P soap base, the saponification and waiting step has been done for you while with cold process, you do it yourself. One of the main benefits of cold process soap making is having complete control over ingredients. Cold process soap has no added detergents, which strip the skin of its natural oils. Additional ingredients may be added to increase the skin loving benefits. Depending on the ingredients you use, cold process soap making typically yields a long-lasting bar of soap. Cold process soaps are better for the environment, healthier for the skin and can be made incredibly moisturising with limitless designs and recipes. The only limit is your creativity. Patience is a virtue. Cold process requires an awesome 6-8 weeks curing time to complete the entire process, the longer the merrier. That explains why they are more expensive than other types of handmade soap, time is money after all. Another downfall is the safety consideration to take into account when dealing with lye, the most essential material to make soap. However, with careful practice and the basic knowledge about it, cold process soap making is still a very safe, healthy and yet fun hobby. #Soap

It seems to be a common theme in history that the things that lead to great progress and convenience also come with a big price. This seems to be very much true with plastic products and packaging. There is no denying that inexpensive plastics have made many aspects of food and water distribution much easier, but emerging research and data from decades of increasing use of plastics suggest that we need to seriously re-evaluate our plastic usage. Our health and the health of our planet would be much better off if we drastically reduced our use of plastic. Here’s why: Health Problems with Plastic Certain chemicals in plastics, like Bisphenol-A (BPA), have gotten media exposure for their potential health problems but there’s much more to the problem that a few isolated chemicals. Phthalates are also found in many plastics and in high levels in indoor air. The European Union banned them in 2005 and many other countries have banned them as well. Phthalates are considered to be especially harmful to men and boys, especially those exposed in utero. They are linked to immune system impairment, reduced testosterone, infertility in men and many other problems. The chemicals in plastics are known endocrine disruptors, and this common thread may explain why we are seeing these problems in many species of animals around the world. Plastics and the Planet When we consider how long it takes for plastic to break down, and the high levels of plastic pollution found even in areas not inhabited by humans (like the ice and water of the Antarctic), we can start to understand how big of a problem plastic pollution can be. These sorts of problems have led Charles Moore, an oceanographer and racing boat captain who played a significant role in discovering and publicizing the great Pacific Garbage Patch, to argue that plastic pollution has become a more urgent problem for ocean life than climate change. “The sad thing is we thought Antarctic waters were clean,” he told the Australian Associated Press after the Tara‘s findings were announced. ”We no longer have an ocean anywhere that is free of pollution.” With widespread plastic usage, it is likely that these problems will only get worse. Reuseit.com reports that: • Over 1 trillion plastic bags are used every year worldwide. Consider China, a country of 1.3 billion, which consumes 3 billion plastic bags daily, according to China Trade News. • About 1 million plastic bags are used every minute. • A single plastic bag can take up to 1,000 years to degrade. • More than 3.5 million tons of plastic bags, sacks and wraps were discarded in 2008. • Only 1 in 200 plastic bags in the UK are recycled (BBC). • The U.S. goes through 100 billion single-use plastic bags. This costs retailers about $4 billion a year. • Plastic bags are the second-most common type of ocean refuse, after cigarette butts (2008). • Plastic bags remain toxic even after they break down. • Every square mile of ocean has about 46,000 pieces of plastic floating in it. Some people reading this are defaulting to the “oh please, everything is going to kill us anymore, this is just alarmist and fear inducing,” mindset, and we don’t blame them. It is hard not to feel like everything is out to get us sometimes, but we truly believe that plastic exposure might be the “cigarettes” of our generation. What Can We Do? One big thing we can all do is to reduce the amount of plastic products we are buying and using. This will reduce our own exposure to plastic pollution, our planet’s plastic load, and will often save money as well. People sometimes worry that sharing a bar of soap is less sanitary than sharing a bottle of liquid soap. But think about it: the bar soap gets rinsed off every time you use it. The plastic pump? Not so much. Where do you think the most germs are accumulating? #Soap #plastic #environment #health #recycle

You may have probably noticed that lye (known as sodium hydroxide or potassium hydroxide) is one of the essential ingredients of soap. On its own, lye is a dangerous alkali which can burn your skin and cause damage to your lungs if inhaled. But once it's mixed safely and properly with oils at a certain temperature, a chemical reaction occurs that saponifies the fats in those oils, thus creating natural soap! Once the soap has cured, there is NO lye left at all and the soap is gentle and moisturizing. Conventional lye was obtained by leaching ashes, containing largely potassium carbonate or "potash". It was the traditional way for soap makers to get the alkali in old days. Any “beauty bars or bath bars” you may find without lye is not soap at all, but a detergent that strips the skin of moisture. You cannot make real soap without lye! #Soap #lye #sodiumhydroxide #natural #akali #saponification #bath #chemical #potassiumhydroxide

Killing for protein and oil is totally unnecessary. Go plant based. Go cold process. It costs no life. It’s worth the time. Jaw of the lion in the above picture is breaking off after fighting hippo (photograph courtesy of National Geography). It symbolises how we often get ourselves hurt after snatching protein or oil from animals. Just like how we are subject to chronic illnesses after years of consumption of animal products. Using plant based ingredients in soap making avoids taking animals' lives. #soap #environment #health #plant #coldprocess #animal

1. Drink more water. Most of us don’t actually drink enough water every day. Water is needed to carry out body functions, remove waste, and carry nutrients and oxygen around our body. We need to replenish our water intake since we lose water every day through urine, bowel movements, perspiration and breathing. Furthermore, drinking more water aids in losing weight. A Health.com study carried out among overweight/obese people showed that water drinkers lose 4.5 more pounds than a control group. Drinking more water helps fill your stomach, making you less hungry and less likely to overeat. We need to drink about 2.0-3.0 litres of water, or about 8-10 glasses. One way to tell if you’re hydrated — your urine should be colourless or slightly yellow. If it’s not, you’re not getting enough water! Other signs include: Dry lips, dry mouth, and little urination. Go get some water first before you continue this article! 2. Get enough rest. When you don’t rest well, you compensate by eating more. Usually it’s junk food. Get enough rest and you don’t need to snack to stay awake. Also, lack of sleep causes premature aging, and you wouldn’t want that. Sleep has the ability to optimise mental and physical energy. Optimal levels of sleep (about eight hours a night) are linked with reduced risk of chronic disease and improved longevity. One simple strategy that can help ensure you get optimal amounts of sleep is to go to bed earlier. Shutting down the computer or turning off the TV early in the evening is often all it takes to create the time and space for earlier sleep. 3. Meditate. Meditation quietens your mind and calms your soul. 4. Exercise. Not just a few times a week, but every day. Movement is life. Research has shown that exercising daily brings tremendous benefits to our health, including increase of life span, lowering of risk of diseases, higher bone density, and weight loss. Increase activity in your life. Choose walking over transport for close distances. Climb the stairs instead of taking the lift. Join some aerobics classes. 5. Pick exercises you enjoy. When you enjoy the sports, you’ll naturally want to do them. Exercise isn’t about suffering and pushing yourself, it’s about being healthy and having fun at the same time. Adding variation in your exercises will keep them interesting. 6. Work out different parts of your body. Don’t just do cardio (like jogging). Give your full body a proper work out. The easiest way is to engage in sports, since they work out different muscle groups. Popular sports include basketball, football, swimming, tennis, squash, badminton, frisbee, and more. 7. Eat more fruits. Fruits contain a plethora of vitamins and minerals. Do you know that oranges offer more health benefits than Vitamin C pills? Taking in synthetic supplements is not the same as consuming the foods directly from nature. Satisfy your palate with these nutritious fruits: Watermelon, Apricots, Avocado (yes, avocado is technically a fruit!), Apple, Cantaloupe, Grapefruit, Kiwi, Guava, Papaya, Strawberries. 8. Eat more vegetables. Like fruits, vegetables are important for good health. Experts suggest 5-9 servings of fruits/vegetables a day, but unfortunately most people don’t even have 5 servings! Nutritional powerhouses filled with fiber and vitamins, fruits and veggies can lower your risk of heart disease by 76% and may even play a role in decreasing your risk of breast cancer. As an added bonus, the inflammation-fighting and circulation-boosting powers of the antioxidants in fruits and veggies can banish wrinkles. 9. Pick bright-coloured foods. Fruits and vegetables with bright colours are usually high in anti-oxidants. Anti-oxidants are good for health because they remove free radicals in our body that damage our cells. So get your fill of fruits/vegetables of different colours: White (Bananas, Mushroom), Yellow (Pineapples, Mango), Orange (Orange, Papaya), Red (Apple, Strawberries, Tomatoes, Watermelon), Green (Guava, Avocados, Cucumber, Lettuce, Celery), Purple/Blue (Blackberries, Eggplant, Prunes). Here’s a full list under the colour wheel. In fact, we have compiled a total of 99 health tips specially for you. Yes, 99 tips! However, it would be rather lengthy to post all of them in a single post here. We have put them altogether in a downloadable article. Simply join our mailing list now to receive it instantly. #fruit #vegetable #health #healthy #life #tips #water #meditate #exercise #workout #body

#soap #water #commonsense #disinfectant

#soap #quote #wisdom