To palm or not to palm?

It's such a simple question, should I use palm oil in my soaps or not? Should be no problem to come up with a quick answer and stick with it, but it's not quite that easy. A lot of people have concerns about the use of palm oil in cosmetics and soap, as well as its use as a cooking oil, and I'll be perfectly honest, I share a lot of those concerns.

If you're not familiar with the controversy over palm oil, I give you this article from 2006. Mass deforestation and destruction of animal habitat, coupled with the pollution caused by trying to produce it as quickly and cheaply as possible...not exactly something that I want to support.

The problem I run into is that there's a reason palm is used so widely in soaps and it's a really simple one: it adds some great qualities to the soap that are difficult to exactly duplicate with other oils and butters. It adds a stable creaminess to the lather and produces a hard soap that lasts a long time. It's also less expensive than a lot of the other oils and butters, so adding it to a formula can reduce the cost per bar. Bottom line, it's nice in soap and it's economical, so it's enormously popular in soap making.

One possible solution is to purchase sustainably produced palm, it's more expensive but there's always a trade off, no? My biggest question about it, though, isn't the price but about greenwashing. Just how sustainable is it really? After doing a lot of reading, it seems to me that a lot of the practices involved in the production of the sustainable oil are only marginally better than the non-sustainable crops. Also, doing a bit of research on some of the companies that have obtained the sustainable certification is unsettling, some are directly and deeply involved in conflicts with indigenous people over land. While it'd be nice to simply admire the logo that pronounces the oil to be sustainable and thus guilt-free, I'm not sure that it wouldn't be the equivalent of sticking my head in the sand just so that I had an easy answer.

With any issue like this one, at the end of the day all we can do is gather the most reliable information available to us, consider it carefully, and make the best choice that we can. I've been pondering palm since the very beginning of my soap making and what I currently believe to be right for me is to just not use palm at all. It makes my formula a bit more expensive and it's taken a lot of experimentation and adjusting the recipe to produce results that I'm happy with, but I think that it's the right decision for me.

It's such a simple question, should I use palm oil in my soaps or not? Should be no problem to come up with a quick answer and stick with it, but it's not quite that easy. A lot of people have concerns about the use of palm oil in cosmetics and soap, as well as its use as a cooking oil, and I'll be perfectly honest, I share a lot of those concerns.

If you're not familiar with the controversy over palm oil, I give you this article from 2006. Mass deforestation and destruction of animal habitat, coupled with the pollution caused by trying to produce it as quickly and cheaply as possible...not exactly something that I want to support.

The problem I run into is that there's a reason palm is used so widely in soaps and it's a really simple one: it adds some great qualities to the soap that are difficult to exactly duplicate with other oils and butters. It adds a stable creaminess to the lather and produces a hard soap that lasts a long time. It's also less expensive than a lot of the other oils and butters, so adding it to a formula can reduce the cost per bar. Bottom line, it's nice in soap and it's economical, so it's enormously popular in soap making.

One possible solution is to purchase sustainably produced palm, it's more expensive but there's always a trade off, no? My biggest question about it, though, isn't the price but about greenwashing. Just how sustainable is it really? After doing a lot of reading, it seems to me that a lot of the practices involved in the production of the sustainable oil are only marginally better than the non-sustainable crops. Also, doing a bit of research on some of the companies that have obtained the sustainable certification is unsettling, some are directly and deeply involved in conflicts with indigenous people over land. While it'd be nice to simply admire the logo that pronounces the oil to be sustainable and thus guilt-free, I'm not sure that it wouldn't be the equivalent of sticking my head in the sand just so that I had an easy answer.

With any issue like this one, at the end of the day all we can do is gather the most reliable information available to us, consider it carefully, and make the best choice that we can. I've been pondering palm since the very beginning of my soap making and what I currently believe to be right for me is to just not use palm at all. It makes my formula a bit more expensive and it's taken a lot of experimentation and adjusting the recipe to produce results that I'm happy with, but I think that it's the right decision for me.