28 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Glycerin soap? Who knew!, January 4, 2001
By A Customer
This review is from: Soothing Soaps (Paperback)
I own another soap making book from Sandy Maine and enjoy it very much, so decided to try another one. After purchasing it from Amazon, I quickly realized that this book is strictly glycerine soaps. There was no indication of this from what I could tell. I wanted a book on actual soap making, not pre-made soap enhanced by botanicals. In summary, the title or book summary should mention that this book is about melt and pour soap only. Consequently, I returned the book.
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23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Not what you might expect, October 25, 1999
By A Customer
This review is from: Soothing Soaps (Paperback)
The soaps are truly beautiful to look at with all the different colors and textures. I expected recipes for cold process soap and not the use of melt and pour bases so I am not completely pleased with this book. Depending on where you reside, some of the ingredients listed in various recipes may be harder to find while other ingredients in my opinion are quite questionable for skincare use. Tincture of benzoin for example is a known sensitizer and is therefore something I would not use in any skincare product. The photos were extremely lovely and I did enjoy reading how to make decoctions, infusions and oils.
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35 of 38 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
this book is a joke, February 14, 2000
By A Customer
This review is from: Soothing Soaps (Paperback)
I had some respect for Sandy Maine and her Sunfeather company until I bought and read this book. I can see her premise being noble; she wants to use herbs and other ingredients effectively and these things do not survive saponification, so she has placed them into Melt & Pour soap. The thing is, M&P soap is one of the worst things you can wash your skin with because it is made with solvents like alcohol, propylene glycol (aka antifreeze), and other chemicals. It is drying. It is no better than the detergent-laced bars most of the world buys and uses.
She has a recipe in this book that is touted as an "Anti-Itch Soap", but the problem is that she tells you to use Peru balsam and benzoin in this recipe. These two products are known skin sensitizers, two of the most common additives that will cause contact dermatitis. She has a recipe for babies that calls for Peru balsam; this soap is supposed to ward off diaper rash. The baby is more likely to get diaper rash if mommy washes it with this weird soap.
There is this misconception floating around out in the soaping collective unconscious that anything that comes from nature is good for you, especially if you put it into products to be used on the skin. No responsible soapmaker would SELL soap that contains known irritants as something to quell skin irritation, so why are these recipes in this book? Some of the worst poisons come straight out of nature and plants. There is no reason for adding these items to a product that is short-lived and limited in therapeutic scope. M&P soap does not stick around for long, as it has a tendency to absorb ambient water in the air and gradually melt. For this reason, the soap absorbing water, these soaps could actually be quite dangerous to use, as water provides an ideal breeding ground for bacteria and fungi. The book should have "Use at your own risk" stamped on the front, but I guess it wouldn't sell as much copies that way.
I came away from this book feeling that Ms. Maine is having the last laugh all the way to the bank. Every one of these recipes calls for M&P soap base, and in her pathetically short list of soapmaking suppliers in the back of the book, her company is the only one listed that sells M&P soap base.
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