Why I Finally Stopped Buying Soap.

I have a confession.

I wish I could tell you how many batches of soap have ended up right back in my crockpot.

Not because they were unsafe.

Not because they were ugly.

Because they just weren't good enough.

My friends and family would tell me, "It's great!" But I knew something was off.

Maybe it left my skin feeling a little too dry.

Maybe the lather wasn't creamy enough.

Maybe it softened too quickly.

Maybe it left a little more soap film in my shower than I wanted.

Whatever it was, if I didn't absolutely love using it, I wasn't going to sell it.

So back into the rebatch pot it went.

I've used Dove Beauty Bar for most of my life because, quite honestly, I liked how it made my skin feel. Through all of my research, I learned that Dove isn't actually a traditional soap—it's a syndet (synthetic detergent) cleansing bar. Traditional handcrafted soap is made differently through saponification, so I knew I couldn't recreate Dove exactly.

Instead, I gave myself a different goal.

I wanted to create a true handcrafted soap that left my skin feeling just as comfortable after every shower.

That journey took months of reading, testing, and reformulating.

I experimented with oils, butters, superfat percentages, lye concentrations, cure times, colloidal oats, yogurt powder, goat milk, oat milk, clays, and countless other ingredients. Every small change taught me something.

One of the biggest lessons I learned is that real soap naturally has a higher pH than your skin. You can't safely make traditional soap with the same pH as a syndet bar. So instead of chasing numbers, I focused on something much more important:

How did it actually feel on my skin?

Slowly, batch by batch, I developed the recipes that became the foundation of Bode Bars.

Today, I can honestly say the only soap I use is my own.

Not because I make it.

Because after all those failed batches, all those late nights, and all that research, I finally created a bar that I genuinely look forward to using every day.

That's why you'll never see me rush a new recipe.

If a soap doesn't meet my standards, it doesn't make it to my shelves.

It gets rebatched, reformulated, or retired.

I'd rather disappoint myself than disappoint one of my customers.

Every bar with the Bode Bars name has earned its place.

And that's a promise I'll always keep.