Why I started making my own bath and skincare products Part 1

Hi everyone,
This is my first blog ever, so bear with me! I wanted to list a few reasons why I started Seri's Soaps, and what it means to me to be able to create healthy, skin safe bath and beauty products.Today I will go over my first reason.
The first reason is simple: I have sensitive skin and many commercial soaps leave my skin very dry and itchy. If you have ever experienced dry, irritated skin (who hasn't right?!) then you know how frustrating it can be to scratch, scratch, scratch all day long. It honestly took me forever to realize why my skin was so irritated all of the time, and the answer? Yup, commercial soap. Now I'm not saying all commercial soaps are bad, some are quite natural really (but often cost a lot more, and I am on a college budget here), but the soaps that I could afford to buy were not the good kind. After realizing that my soap was making me so itchy (and lotion was not a great fix by the way, a topic I will get into later), I started doing research into what ingredients in commercial soaps were irritating my skin so badly. The answer: chemicals, added preservatives, and detergent. I have a sensitivity to SLS (a sulfate), and unfortunately this is in almost every commercial bar of soap. SLS is not all bad however, it cleans and removed oils from the skin, both things necessary in a shower, however, if you shower too often (more than once a day), then SLS can strip your skin bare and leave it irritated. Since I have naturally dry skin anyways, SLS was no good for me. A solution I have found to be quite helpful is using SLES instead of SLS. SLES is still a sulfate, so it still has all of the benefits of SLS, but it is much more gentle and more suited for sensitive skin types. I have not had any problems with using SLES, and my skin is much happier now. Even worse than SLS irritation were the multitudes of preservatives, especially Parabens that I found in commercial soaps. Paraben preservatives are known to cause cancer in some people and I have no desire to use a product that could potentially cause cancer (expeically one that is SUPPOSED to be good for me!). Now I know that there are a million things that cause cancer, and I'm not saying that if you use a product with paraben preservatives in it you are guaranteed to get cancer, but if you can avoid it, then why not? There are plenty of skin safe, gentle, full spectrum preservatives out there that are much healthier than parabens, and those are what I use in my products. No parabens here! One problem I kept finding in commercial soaps was that they had 2 or even 4 preservatives in them! WHY?! You only need one as long at it is full spectrum, and I have found a great one that is gentle and full spectrum, so I never use more than that in a product, it's simply not necessary. Finally, detergents. Why, why, WHY would you ever put detergent into a soap. Oh, right, because it's cheap, and people won't notice it's bad because it SOUNDS like it is good, but really it is sucking the life out of your skin. Detergents strip away ALL of your skins natural oils (kind of like sulfates but much stronger and much more damaging). Detergents leave that nasty residue on your skin that you may remember hearing about in that old Dove commercial. There simply is no reason why you should have a detergent in your soap, glycerin and gentle sulfates clean us enough without stripping away everything that our skin needs.
Because of this, and many more reasons that I will get to later, I started Seri's Soaps. I wanted to share my dislike of commercial chemicals with the world, and to provide healthy, skin safe soaps and other bath products to those who, like me, can not tolerate all of the harsh chemicals. If you don't have sensitive skin you probably don't notice any irritation from commercial products, but even so, isn't it better to use something that is healthy anyways? Either way, the world needs more natural, healthy, and higher quality products, commercial marketing has stripped us of anything made to last and worth the money. We are a consumer society, and through that we have lost our ability to scrutinize what we are actually purchasing, and instead purchase because of the brand name or the price. I have gone back to the basics with Seri's Soaps, and I am no longer following the masses in buying commercial brands because I want to give my skin what it really needs instead of simply buying something potentially harmful because it is cheap.