What Is Cold Process Soap? (And Why We Make Ours the Slow Way)

Walk down most supermarket aisles and what you'll find labelled "soap" is usually a synthetic detergent bar, mass-produced in a factory, with the natural glycerin stripped out and sold off separately. Real soap — the kind that's actually made through soap making, not just moulded from a chemical base — is rarer than people think. At Getting Clean, we make ours using the cold process method, by hand, in our production base in Leeds, Yorkshire.

So What Actually Is Cold Process Soap?

Cold process soap making is one of the oldest methods of making soap, and it works through a chemical reaction called saponification: natural oils and fats are combined with a mild alkali, and left to react slowly at a low temperature (hence "cold process," as opposed to methods that use externally applied heat to speed things up).

The result is a genuine soap, not a detergent bar, that retains its natural glycerin. Glycerin is a humectant, meaning it draws moisture to the skin, which is one of the reasons cold-processed soap tends to feel less drying than the sulphate-based bars you'll find in most shops.

Because there's no shortcut for the saponification process, cold process soap has to cure for several weeks before it's ready to sell. It's slower, it's more hands-on, and it's harder to scale — which is exactly why most big cosmetic brands don't bother with it.

Why We Do It This Way

A few reasons:

No dodgy chemicals. Our bars are cold-processed rather than built from synthetic detergent, and they're free from SLS, SLES, parabens, PFAS and triclosan. If it doesn't belong on your skin, we don't put it in the pot.

It's handmade, properly. Every bar is made by hand in our Leeds production base, not extruded on an industrial line. That's part of why we describe ourselves as a handmade soap company rather than just a soap brand.

It matters to our mission. Getting Clean is a soap business run by people with lived experience of addiction, and soap making itself is part of our recovery workshops. Cold process soap making is a genuinely therapeutic, hands-on craft — measuring, mixing, pouring, waiting — and that slowness is part of the point, for the soap and for the people making it.

What to Look For if You Want the Real Thing

If you're shopping for cold process or handmade soap, a few tell-tale signs help separate the genuine article from a relabelled detergent bar:

• A short ingredients list (ours starts with sodium olivate, sodium cocoate, glycerin and aqua — a handful of recognisable oils, not a chemistry set)
• No mention of "sodium lauryl sulphate" or "sodium laureth sulphate" on the label
• A maker who's happy to explain their process, rather than just their scent notes

We make eight scents this way, from Sandalwood & Pine Needle to Peppermint, Seaweed & Kelp, each cold-processed in small batches in Leeds. You can see the full range in our shop, or read more about why we started making soap in the first place on our Our Story page.