SOAP OF ALEP 20% BAY-TREE 205 GR

20% Bay-tree, WITHOUT PERFUME WITHOUT CONSERVATIVE. For sensitive skin and very dry.

History: The soap of Alep in the beginning, is recognized to have been elaborate in this city, in its traditional form, in the parallelepipedic “bread” shape, there has more than one millenium and half before our era, and would be thus more than three thousand five hundred years. Then, during the crusades, its receipt, hawked buzz marketing by the travellers of the silk route, would have reached Europe, passing by Italy and Spain. He would be thus the ancestor of the whole of the hard soaps in the world, and, in particular, of the household soap, much more recent, dating from the end of the 17th century.

Composition: The principal fat which constitutes this soap is the olive oil of second pressure, to which are added a minimum of water, a base (generally of the soda, formerly extracted the ash of salicorne) as well as bay oil and sheets of bay-tree (Laurus nobilis), which gives him its famous green color, which had with the natural presence of chlorophyl, before drying.

Manufacturing: To obtain saponification, the olive oil is heated, with water and soda, in enormous cauldrons, then, oils of bays, and especially of sheets of bay-tree, are added to finish this reaction, which lasts more than twenty hours. The paste, of green color, is then spread out to be cut out in blocks, in an artisanal way. These blocks will be then erected scaffolding in the shape of turns, for one period of nine months drying, in quite ventilated cellars. During this time, chlorophyl, private of sun, will oxidize slowly surfaces some and this new color chestnut, so characteristic will give them, in the absence of any photosynthesis. The soap of traditional Alep is thus appeared always as a maroon parallelepipedic bread, on which the name of the manufacturer as well as the quality of the soap is registered.