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Aspire Colorado Gold Liquid Castile Soap

About Aspire Colorado Gold Liquid Castile Soap - A Natural Ecofriendly Personal Care Choice

     Castile soap is a simple, natural eco-friendly soap that is healthy for our skin, and biodegradable.  In order to make a castile soap, whether liquid or solid, you need a strong caustic and vegetable oils.  The caustic and oils are blended and heated, and they react, or saponify, to form surfactants, which are essentially organic salts of the fatty acids that make up the oils.  

 

     There are two legal ways to label a soap.  The first is to list the caustics and oils that were used, and the second is to list the surfactants that are formed as a result of the saponification reaction.  At Aspire, we prefer to be transparent to our customers, so our labels list the raw materials, which are the natural ingredients, that were used to make the soap, rather than the surfactants in the soap.  This is because the names of the raw materials, like canola oil, are more recognizable to consumers than the names of surfactants, like sodium oleate, or octadecenoic acid, sodium salt, which would be more familiar to an industrial surfactant chemist working for DuPont than they would be to an average consumer. 

 

     At Aspire, we want to make it easy for you to understand what’s in our products, not complicated.  One disadvantage of showing our raw materials is that Potassium Hydroxide is an extremely dangerous and if you google it, you’ll get some pretty scary information.  The good news is that the caustic is completely gone after the saponification reaction.  Also, strong caustic has no chronic health effects, it simply burns your skin if you spill it, which is more of a concern for the soap-maker than it is for the consumer.

Ingredients in Aspire Colorado Gold Liquid Castile Soap

  • Canola Oil.  Organic, sourced from U.S.A.  Natural, rendered from seeds of canola plant.
  • Soy Bean Oil.  Organic, sourced from U.S.A.  Natural, rendered from soy beans.
  • Safflower Oil.  Organic, sourced from Mexico.  Natural, rendered from seeds of Safflower.

  • Hemp Seed Oil.  Organic, sourced from Canada.  Natural, rendered fromhemp seeds.

  • Potassium Hydroxide (Caustic Potash).  Strong caustic, sourced from U.S.A.  Sort of natural, potassium chloride salt is mined, and converted to potassium hydroxide using electrolysis. 

  • Essential Oils for Scent.  We use a variety of essential oils, as listed on our labels.  Essential oils are natural ingredients that are rendered from various plant parts, such as seeds, leaves, stems, bark, flowers and roots.  Almost all of these are organic, and a few are not.  We are moving towards 100% organic essential oils.  It is difficult to find sources of essential oils that are made in the U.S.A., but we are continuing to work on that.  We are making some essential oils in our Golden facility from our own organically-grown plants, but they are limited in volume and don’t make up a significant portion of the essential oils used in our products.

  • Water.  Sourced from Golden, Colorado.  Our castile soap is as concentrated as we can make it, while still easily poured, and contains 80% water.  In Golden, we have the best water, since it flows directly down Clear Creek from its source, Saint Mary’s Glacier, high in the Rocky Mountains.  This is the same source of water used by the mighty Coors Brewery!  Also, by making the soap locally, we are saving 80% of the carbon footprint of transportation for common liquid soaps and detergents that are manufactured a great distance away, and then transported to big stores.​​

Ingredients That We Avoid in Aspire Colorado Gold Liquid Castile Soap

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  • Synthetic Preservatives, such as phenoxyethanol or methylisothiazolinone.  These are completely unnecessary in soap, which is inherently inhospitable to bacterial growth, so we see no point in complicating the product with toxins that aren’t needed in the first place.  These also tend to be made from fossil fuels, another reason we avoid them.

  • Synthetic dyes.  These are typically made from fossil fuels, and tend to be extremely toxic to aquatic life, and not very biodegradable.  The soap works whether it’s a pretty color or not, so why poison the environment and ourselves just to have pink soap?  The gold color of Aspire Colorado Gold soap is natural, and comes from the oils used to make the soap.

  • Synthetic Fragrances, Perfumes, Parfum.  We avoid these for the same reasons as synthetic dyes.  Many products will list “fragrance” or “parfum” as an ingredient, with no definition of what the fragrance is.  When big companies do this, they are keeping their particular fragrance proprietary, which is legal, but to the consumer it means that the secret “fragrance” is synthetic, and likely derived from fossil fuels.  If the “fragrance” were natural, the label would proudly display the essential oils used to scent the soap, rather than hiding the actual chemicals behind the term “fragrance”.

  • Chelants, such as EDTA, or ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid.  These are used in soaps to “soften” the water that the soap is added to, in order to make the soap foamier.  The problem with chelants like this is that in the environment they react with essential nutrients in water, making them unavailable for aquatic plants and microbes that require them for health and growth.  We feel that a little less foam is a good trade-off for our environment.

  • Silicas, such as siloxanes and silicones, are used as antifoaming agents in products such as laundry detergents.  Our liquid soap has mild foam, and works just fine in the laundry without silica additives.  Siloxanes are not readily biodegradable, and they tend to leave scale on equipment at wastewater treatment plants that try to recover biogas, a valuable fuel that can be used to replace natural gas, adding to maintenance costs.  They are also highly toxic to aquatic life.

   

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