My name is Alicia Nottingham and I love soap.

I’ve been a hobbyist soapmaker for about 10 years. It all started with a Christmas gift of a simple melt-and-pour soap bar. I immediately dove into the internet and YouTube and discovered cold-process soapmaking. I’ve never looked back. It took me years to formulate a recipe that I love and use on my own skin. With ingredients like smooth organic shea butter, cleansing coconut oil and bubbly castor oil, my soaps are designed to be loved. I am a Greener Life Club lifetime member. I’m also a member of the Handcrafted Soap and Cosmetics Guild

It begins with a little science and a little math and ends with creativity and a product I adore. Cold process soap starts out as sodium hydroxide and oils. Using soap calculators available at SoapCalc and Bramble Berry, I calculate the specific amounts of my base recipe using precise measurements. Then comes the fun stuff - the additives! I love to add luxurious additives to my recipe such as kaolin or Brazilian clays, colloidal oatmeal and sustainably sourced tussah silk fibers. My fragrances are added following IFRA standards and my colorants are only sourced from reputable suppliers. Once all the adding and mixing is complete, my soap is poured into individual or loaf molds and allowed to undergo the magical chemical reaction that makes this process so fun. Fast forward a few days and the soaps are unmolded, cut to size and left to cure for 4-6 weeks. This cure time allows excess water to evaporate while the soap becomes mild and the lather becomes rich. You can watch the process in action on my YouTube channel.

Now that you know all about my process, I hope you’ll browse my shop and take some of my creativity from my home to yours.