Tunnel Mill Soap Co.

See you all tomorrow 9/12 at the Columbus Farmer's Market 9am-12:30pm! Some scents will sell out so come early 🧼🫧

Our last Columbus Farmer's Market for the season is this Saturday! 🥲 Take a sniff of our suds & check out our handmade 🏳️‍🌈 Pride magnets & stone soap dishes/coasters

You'll find us in the back row today! Beautiful, cool morning for some local shopping 😁 Columbus Farmer's Market

Today's Lineup 🧼🫧

We'll see you at the Columbus Farmer's Market at 9am!

This is so true! We put our heart, brain & soul into each batch of handmade soap. We're so glad you all appreciate it as much as we do 🥰

🧼 Day 10 of "Behind the Bar": Why Does Handmade Soap Cost More Than Store-Bought Soap? 🫧

Have you ever looked at a handmade soap bar and thought…“Why is this little bar more expensive than the soap at the (insert big box store here)?” 🤔

It’s a fair question! The answer is simple: handmade soap & commercial bars are often made very differently.

When I make a batch of soap, I'm:

🧪 Carefully formulating the recipe
🌿 Choosing & measuring each ingredient
🥽 Donning my fabulous PPE
🫧 Mixing batches, colors, and clays
🧼 Pouring, designing the tops, cutting, & trimming each loaf by hand
⏳ Waiting 4–6 weeks for the soap to cure
🧼Stamping each bar by hand with my logo
🖨 Creating, printing, & cutting labels by hand.
📦 Wrapping & labeling each bar individually
📷 Taking photos & marketing my soap

Traditional handmade soap is made through saponification, the reaction between oils/fats and lye that creates soap and naturally occurring glycerin.

(Soap/Science Nerd Alert): Many commercial “soap” bars are actually syndet bars (synthetic detergent bars). They are made with manufactured cleansing ingredients called surfactants. These products can still clean well but they’re just a different type of product.

Commercial bars are also made on a much larger scale, using formulas designed to be produced by the thousands.

Handmade soap is different.

Every batch is small. Every loaf is cut by hand. Every scent is tested. Every ingredient has a purpose.

Take scent development, for example…

You’ve probably heard me talk about my mission to find the perfect patchouli scent. 😂🌿 (Spoiler alert: I found it!)

It sounds simple, just pick a fragrance & make soap, right?

Not quite!

I test different scents, see how they behave in soap, evaluate how they change during curing, & decide if they truly belong in my collection.

Because a scent that smells amazing in the bottle doesn’t always smell the same once it becomes soap.

Fragrance oil in the bottle is highly concentrated. Once it’s added to a soap recipe, it becomes distributed throughout the entire bar & interacts with all the other ingredients in the formula.

The curing process can also change how a scent develops. Some notes become softer, some become stronger, & some completely surprise you!

That’s part of the fun (& sometimes the frustration 😂) of handmade soap.

A handmade bar isn’t just a cleaning product, it’s a small-batch product made by a person, not a machine producing thousands of identical bars.

💬 What’s something handmade that you think is worth paying a little more for?

Don't let the clouds fool you, the sun is shining! Here until 12:30pm