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 1/2013 We are excited to announce that we have purchased organic and fair trade oils for our soaps. Additionally, we will be using only essential oils, not fragrance oils, in all of our soaps and body butters. So to make room for our new products, we will be discontinuing any cold process soaps with colorants added to them, all of our melt and pour soaps, and any soaps that have fragrance oils instead of essential oils in them.

All of our products are skin loving and vegan (with the exception of a honey soap we're developing).

Shop Sage Flower Hill knowing our soaps are as good for your conscience as they are for your skin!

Sage Flower HIll: Soaps with a Conscience

Soap making, for Sarah, started like many things in her life. It was a tangent of research she was doing on the internet. The subject she was researching: what to do with the preponderance of lavender plants in her backyard. Several internet searches dashed her idea of making essential oils (for now...) due to the complexity of the distillation process and led her to suppliers of essential oils. These essential oil suppliers just so happened to be soap making suppliers.

Like any good internet researcher, she investigated this idea further. She bought several downloadable books about the basics of soap making and after reading took the plunge. She placed her first order for supplies to make melt and pour soaps for co-workers and end of school year teacher gifts.

After that small project she pondered the feasibility of making her family's soap. She had always been aware of the ingredients lists on the soaps she purchased at the store and had a keen nose for nice smelling body products. She tended to purchase organic soaps from the natural food store; making sure the soaps were paraben free. This concern was borne from a worry about using mass produced soaps and lotions that would damage the skin and/or internal organs (due to absorption of toxic chemicals through the skin).

Her first big project after that was liquid soap making. As soap makers know, this was probably the best and worst big project she could have taken on. Making liquid soap is complex, time consuming and requires a lot of baby-sitting over the course of many hours. Not a good project for someone with a full time job and a family with small children. The soap ended up like highly complex projects done by novices, not very good. This project in hindsight was good and bad. She understood the in's and out's outs of a fairly complex process therefor making cold process soap making seem like a walk in the park.

With a healthy dose of caution from the last botched batch of soap, she proceeded carefully towards cold process soap making. She was inspired to make soaps with beautiful swirls and designs. She bought oodles of colorants, several soap molds, many fragrance oils and a myriad of oils to saponify her soaps. After many batches, several quite lovely to look at but few quite ugly as all get out, she found herself questioning her original vision towards soap making. With a few of her batches leaking all over her sink, colorant bleeding in the wrong spots, a few loaves of drying soap dropped and damaged, she wondered if this might be an indicator that she should consider a different direction with her soap.

Going back to her original vision of creating healthy soaps for everyday use she decided to focus on finding suppliers of organic, fair trade and sustainable ingredients. She also made the hard choice of nixing fragrance oils and unnatural colorants from her repertoire. Using fragrance oils had made scenting her soap a simple process. Colorants added that visual appeal, yet the argument of using healthy ingredients on the largest organ in the body seemed win out over simplicity and visual appeal.

Since making this shift she has been making only natural and organic soaps that are naturally scented with essential oils and naturally colored with the essential oils and saponified oils in the soap batches. Since making this change, she has felt more confident and proud of her finished products.

Sage Flower Hill's body butters made the shift to 'Fair Trade' shea butter after many hours of research on the origins of shea butter. Finding just the right shea butter took quite a bit of research but was well worth the time.

Our newest soaps (that are currently curing) are made from organic olive oil, fair trade shea butter, sustainability produced palm oil and organic coconut oil. They are scented with the finest and best smelling essential oil combinations out there.

While we're making the transition to totally organic ingredients we will be slowly clearing out all of our 'melt and pour' soaps from our stock. We will replace many of these colorful soaps with more natural alternatives.

Thank you for your patronage and support! We look forward to supplying your family with natural body products with a good conscience!