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Non Toxic Hand Soap
Even cleaner than “clean ingredient soaps”— these hand soaps are made with super-minimal, recognizable, whole ingredients.
Health Y Sol
Made with just honey and saponified tallow, olive, coconut, and castor oils, this can be used as a hand soap, or comes with instructions for dilution for laundry, hair and dishes. Choose from fragrance free or essential oil options. Lots of 5 star reviews. They offer glass foaming soap pump bottles, too.
Buy in a soap pump bottle, or fill your own with this sustainable refill pouch. This non toxic gel soap is made of just saponified coconut, jojoba, and olive oils, glycerin, aloe, and guar gum from the guar plant to thicken. Comes in lavender or lemongrass scent— 100% essential oils and plant extracts only. No synthetic fragrances, vegan.
Meliora offers foaming soap tabs for pump dispensers, shown above, as well as bars of soap, both made with the same simple ingredients lists: saponified vegetable oils and glycerin. They have both unscented and scented versions made with organic oils like lavender, clove, and others. Super transparent, and synthetics- and plastic- free.
The best non toxic hand soap if you like bars. As minimal as you can get. This unscented bar of soap is made of 100% saponified olive oil. No additives whatsoever. Vegan, and great if you have a coconut allergy, since many soaps include coconut. Check their prices on their online shop here or on Amazon here.
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More About Organic Hand Soap
What makes a hand soap healthy?
Hand soaps can be held to a higher standard than other cleaning products. That’s because they don’t need to be wipeable, streak-free, stain-lifting, or safe for specific surfaces like grout or quartz, like other cleaning solutions do. All you need is a saponified oil to effectively remove 99.9% of germs off your hands.
What is a saponified oil?
A saponified oil is soap. Saponification has been around for thousands of years (humans discovered soap-making around 2800 BC). Historically, animal fat was mixed with potassium hydroxide (lye) which came from the ash of burnt wood, and the reaction created an ultra-simple soap. We still use this process today, though more often with vegetable fats. Letting a bar of soap fully cure after saponification means letting it rest long enough to ensure all of the lye has reacted completely with the fat. This means no lye is left; the entire thing has been turned into a new substance: soap. Any remaining fat in the soap acts as a moisturizer. You can also make soap with non-solid fats, like olive oil (castile soap), coconut oil, or other vegetable oils.
What about EWG Verified hand soaps?
These are usually good, too, but they’re more chemically complicated than the ones I have listed above. Grove Collaborative bar soaps, Branch Basics gel soap, Blueland’s fragrance free foaming tabs, and other brands like this have popular non-toxic hand soaps that have earned the Environmental Working Group’s (EWG) badge for being healthy for humans and the planet. If you don’t already know, the EWG rates ingredients on a scale of 1-10 for toxicity, and the healthiest products are eligible for their strictest category, EWG Verified, if they also disclose 100% of their ingredients. However, EWG Verified isn’t perfect; for example, this soap’s synthetic fragrance scores an 8/10 for toxicity, but it still has the EWG Verified seal of approval. I get it— it’s nice to have a scented soap that matches the season, and if all the other ingredients are safe besides the fragrance, you might decide it’s OK for you. I appreciate this kind of detailed transparency that EWG provides, but when it comes to hand soaps, I still think less is more. Why choose a hand soap made in a lab that needs its ingredients assessed for safety, when you can choose one made with ultra-natural, simple ingredients that have already been known to be safe for thousands of years?
What are the best non-toxic scented soaps?
The best non-toxic scent is one made from 100% organic essential oils. The brands I have listed above offer unscented and scented products. Read more about scents here.
Shop by Room ➜ Kitchen ➜ Hand Soap