On August 1st, 2005, I decided to play around a little with ingredients. I wanted to see what all the hubbub was about with a 'castile' soap. Granted, you can't really have an official castile soap unless it's been made in that region (like champagne or bologna), but I always see ads for castile soap and I wanted to see what it was all about. Traditionally, castile soap (first made in the 13th century in Spain) was made with olive oil. JUST olive oil. There are some reports that it was also made with animal fats but as people are hesitant these days to use any kind of animal by-product, I chose to just stick with the olive oil. My ingredients are as follows:

extra virgin olive oil

Ha Ha! Yup. That's it. I made a sample batch using a lined paper towel tube as a mold. I was able to cut into little discs a couple of days after, but the soap was still soft to the point of picking up my fingerprints every time I touched it. Turns out that olive oil soap makes an EXTREMELY hard bar of soap (which explains why people use it a lot), but it takes a really long time to set up. You can see from the picture above that the castile soap has little yellow centers. That's because of the exceedingly long set up time. The one I was using to try out is a nice solid white.

Anyway, it's soap. It works. Because it's just olive oil, there is very little in the way of lather. But it IS extremely gentle. So I guess I know what to use for people that have sensitivities to just about everything and need something extremely gentle.