How Natural Soap Became My Passion

Get the Dragonfly Soaps inside story for some good, clean fun!

I started making natural soap because I love to CREATE and soapmaking fulfills many levels of my creative expression. I can use my hands, my head and my heart in the soapmaking process and...to me the process is calming to the soul.

I love the TECHNICAL part of soapmaking - Understanding the chemical process of what happens when you mix a base and an acid together, researching ingredients, calculating ratios of saponification values of fats and oils, mixing them together and making something completely new from them.

I love the SENSUAL part of soapmaking - Experimenting with and mixing up scents using my imagination and intuition, taking cues from conversations, the written word and wiffs in the air wherever I may be. The aromatherapy value in the shower or bath. The silky feel of a wet bar of One Summer Night or the visual appeal of the color and texture of Exotic Earth or Triple Chocolate Mint when wet and worn slightly down from use...Okay, you can call me weird here if you like but you won't know till you try it!

I love the VALUE TO COMMUNITY that soapmaking provides and the potential it could provide in the future - A good luxurious bar of natural soap, useful and made from simple ingredients, cut by hand and expertly trimmed and beautifully wrapped, sometimes even hand delivered when possible. I love running a small business as opposed to a large corporation. As we grow we will model our business structure after a new paradigm. One that is people oriented, where employees are seen not as automatons, but as people with families with obligations. A business with a sense of community within and out.

I hope you'll like knowing that your purchase of our natural soap brings our energy into your space. I want my little story to give you a sense of the spirit that goes into each and every bar of Dragonfly Soaps. Go Ahead. Choose...

Offering You Both Retail And Wholesale Natural Soaps

In addition to the retail shopping available here on our website, we are pleased to form wholesale partnerships with qualified wholesalers. Are you a wholesaler? Please, fill out our simple form and we'll contact you promptly to discuss our wholesale policies. We'd really love to hear from you!

Want To Learn More About Our Natural Soaps?

Dragonfly Soaps natural soaps are hand made in small, careful batches in a woodsy soapmakers shop that borders Beltzville State Park, Pennsylvania - a place you may be familiar with if you've ever seen those romantic ads for honeymooning in the Pocono Mountains! We offer you 5 main categories of natural soap:  

• Unscented Soap - Our Cocoa Butter and Baby Soaps are wonderfully simple and totally fragrance free.
• Workhorse Soap - Our Shaving Soap, Gardener's Soap and other functional bars each have a specific purpose for a specific cleansing need.
• Almost Edibles Soap - So fragrant, you'll want to bite them, this scented soap collection has a bar for every taste.
• Earthy and Mysterious Soap - Superfatted shea butter soaps with unique, evocative fragrances that celebrate the mystique of life on Earth.
• Lavender and Flowers Soap - The floral peace and goodness of blooming gardens, captured in these hand made herbal soaps.

It's been our experience that savvy customers looking for natural soap like learning all the details about not only the ingredients that go into a bar of soap, but also the soapmaking process and the history of the company crafting the bars. If you like complete information about the companies you support, I hope the following insider's look at Dragonfly Soaps will help you to feel fully informed and very positive:

How I Got Into A Lather Over Natural Soaps!

I started buying handcrafted soap from an artisan craft fair in Allentown, PA. many years ago. I would spend a long time perusing all the choices, picking them up, smelling each one before selecting my purchase. Every year I would buy more and more and I knew in no uncertain terms that, at some point, I would try making soap myself. It was to be sooner than I expected.

I found a soap making kit on sale for half price in a mall at a Nature store that was going out of business. It was all packaged neatly in it's own 9" x 12" wooden mold and included nearly everything I needed. I made that 3 lb. batch of soap, scented it with the bitter almond included in the kit, could barely wait to unmold it the next day and then had to wait for it to cure for a couple weeks until I could use it but when I did, I knew I was in love.

I bought a book that detailed the soapmaking process and got right to work. The book really educated me, and what it didn't teach, I learned through trial and error and the Internet. I tried all kinds of recipes and techniques - adding texture with oatmeal and seeds and eggshells and loofa sponges. I experimented with cinnamon and chlorophyll, paprika, tumeric, alkanet root, annatto seeds and chocolate for color. I used only essential oils for scent, then started mixing them to create new and unique scents.

Next I learned the technical aspects of natural soapmaking - the chemical process that takes place and how every oil or fat adds specific qualities to the finished bar of soap like a fluffy, sparse or stable lather, bar hardness or softness, emolliency, silkiness, or moisturizing qualities. I learned to formulate my own natural soap recipes.

At this point, I was making soap pretty regularly....yes, I was hooked. I was giving it away to family and friends and co-workers but it was still starting to pile up. I needed an outlet. I decided to start a business and, inspired by the fact that dragonflies always seem to appear around me everywhere I went, I decided on the name Dragonfly Soaps. I rented booth space at an antique and craft store and started on the local craft show circuit. My friend and neighbor, Kathi, loved the soap and suggested doing home spa parties. So, that we did and they were wildly successful! It's hard not to love rolling your feet over marbles in a tub of warm scented water while you sample all natural handcrafted milk bath salts, body butters, sugar scrubs, mud masks, facial scrubs, lip butters and sniffing a variety of soap. I was very busy.

As my wholesale and retail customer base grew I eventually quit the home parties and the craft shows. It was tiring to lug all of that stuff around. I slowed my life down to a more sane pace. In 2009, I took on a partner, Tom, who is heading up Dragonfly Soaps' Sales and Marketing and is the Chief Financial Officer. Dragonfly Soaps has incorporated and we have three helpers working with us to keep up with demand. We still make natural soap in the same way and with the same attention to detail as before, although we have increased the batch size. And we still use that original 9" x 12" wooden soap mold for sample batches when we experiment with new scents. It is still all cut, trimmed and wrapped by hand.

It's important to me to be running my small business in the greenest possible manner. Our lovely labels are made of eco-friendly recycled paper and nothing toxic is created or disposed of from our soapmakers shop. Our print materials are recycled paper, too! All leftover slivers and end cuts of bars of soap are all recycled. Nothing gets thrown away. We donate the bigger end cuts to charities or give them as gifts to our customers. The shavings from the trimmed edges of the bars are made into soap balls and sold or given to kids with instructions on how to make their own soap balls or soap on a rope. We are members of Green America and the Handcrafted Soapmakers Guild. Making natural soap doesn't need to leave a big footprint when it's done correctly and traditionally, and I want you to feel really good about enjoying fabulous hand made soaps while supporting an eco-friendly small business. With Dragonfly Soaps, you can have it all!

About The Scents That Give Fabulous Fragrance To My Natural Soaps

Back in the 1990s, concern for my own good health pointed the way for me towards using personal care products with simple, natural ingredients that I could pronounce and eating foods as close to nature as possible. My first batches of soap were created to take care of me and I wanted them natural, pure and uncomplicated. I searched the Internet for essential oils to use for scenting soap and stumbled on one of my most valuable discoveries in Young Living Essential Oils. Even though it was not possible to use them for scenting soap, they were wonderful to use for aromatherapy and for all and any health issues. I really enjoyed using these essential oils in a variety of personal care products I was making for myself. If, like me, you are working towards creating a more natural personal care regimen, you'll be glad to know that many of our soaps are scented only with essential oils. All the ingredients are listed here on our website and on the labels of our hand made soaps.

I believe there's a perfect soap for every person, and for some time, I had been getting repeated requests for a jasmine and a rose soap. As the cost for these essential oils was prohibitive, I looked for alternatives and was happy to discover that it takes a lot less of a fragrance oil to scent soap than it does an essential oil. So this means that any Dragonfly Soaps bar soap scented in part or in full with a fragrance oil is no less than 98.5% natural. And, of course, our bar soaps scented strictly with essential oils are 100% natural. It's my goal to create the soaps you ask for and will love, crafted of the best soapmaking ingredients I can find!

I hope the information I've shared will help you to feel really smart every time you reach for a bar of our Dragonfly Soaps pure and natural bar soap. Happy Washing!