An Introduction to our Sheep Milk Soap Ingredients

Sheep Milk Soap

I have to laugh at the number of times that I have been corrected when I tell customers that I am selling sheep milk soap.

“You mean goat milk.’

“No I mean sheep milk.”

“You can’t milk sheep.”

Au contraire. I do. Regularly. I even milk feral breed sheep! If a creature is lactating, you can milk them. The question then becomes SHOULD you milk them. My sister once milked a cat, and there is a small farm in Italy that makes pig milk cheese. I have been forbidden by Kyle to ever attempt either.

Kyle and I have used goat milk soap for years. We are blessed in our little town to have a farm to table restaurant and boutique which sells Christian books, goat milk soap and lotion, and other homesteady gift type things. Both Kyle and I have struggled with super dry skin or eczema for years, and the more natural skin care products have helped a lot with such maladies. However, it never completely cleared up.

After our first milking season I froze quite a bit of our extra sheep milk in plastic containers. When I thawed it out, the milk had clabbered - still good to use, but I had wanted it to put in my morning tea… and clabbered milk in black tea just isn’t appealing to me (Although I’m sure some tribal culture somewhere has made a national beverage out of this kind of thing).

So I baked with some of it, and then decided to see if it would make decent soap.

Oh

My

Goodness.

The soap was amazing. And after a few weeks of using it… all my eczema cleared up!

Now I will go ahead and say this: MY eczema cleared up. Kyle’s didn’t really do much. So I just want to be upfront and clear from the get go- eczema is a complicated issue. There is a lot of research on it, and the ‘experts’ are unclear if Eczema comes from adrenal insufficiency, gut dysbiosis, food allergies, mineral deficiency, essential fatty acid insufficiency, heavy metal poisoning… or a combination of the above. So using sheep milk isn’t a slam dunk for everyone wanting to clear up itchy scratchy flaky skin. I just know in my case, it was a game changer. (For what its worth, when Kyle cut out ALL grains then his eczema cleared up)

So why do I think the sheep milk helped me? Well, for starters, I grew up in a very fat-phobic household. I craved butter and whenever I used too much I was reassured that I would ‘die of a heart attack’ by the time I was 30. (I am happy to say I’m 36 and doctors are always amazed at how great my blood pressure is.) We did a lot of fat free, low fat, skinless, transfat heavy foods. We also had a large family so we ate cheap. All of us had dry skin. Once I did some gallbladder healing and embraced fats, my hormones regulated, my moods stopped swinging, and my skin issues started clearing up.

I also use lard or tallow (depending on what I can get from local farmers) in my soap. Both lard and tallow are reemerging as amazing remedies for skin issues, as well as a garden variety of health issues. The goat milk soap we had been purchases had no animal products in it other than the goat milk. Everything else was a plant fat or oil. I use those in my soap recipe as well, but I really think the lard and sheep milk soap are the reason why I saw such dramatic improvement in my skin. I also use beeswax, which has been used for millennia for beauty and skincare products as far back as Ancient Egypt.

Essential Fatty Acids are not the same thing as transfats. Transfats - the ones mankind create in an industrial setting - are what cause the health issues. Essential Fatty Acids - the ones that God made and are found in Nature - are nourishing and life giving. They are what wild animals go after first when they hunt. It's how you trick your dog to take its nasty medication - bacon grease.

Our culture has become ridiculously fat phobic. Fats do not kill you or make you fat. Eating fat makes you full. You can’t overeat fats because you will get full or your gallbladder will throw a fit and you’ll get sick. This is why Ma Ingall’s limited how much ‘rich’ food Laura and the girls could eat at one time, especially if they weren’t used to it. Intuitively she knew the family’s gut flora and gallbladders needed time to adjust.

But back to the soap.

Sheep milk has many different chemical constituents that goat and cow milk does not have (I’ll have to do a whole separate blog post on this later) that aid in the human body assimilating it faster than other milks, especially cows. Sheep have also stubbornly refused to adhere to factory farming insisting that they comply to industry standards of bigger, better, faster, fatter, cheaper, leaner. The sheep just die rather than comply (This is also why I hate the Libertarians calling those who comply to our Government’s ridiculous policies of the last 3 years as “sheep.” Sheep don’t do that crap. They die rather than comply. They are very stubborn. Now cows on the other hand… ) This means that the products they make are not prone to the same issues that other livestock has - their genetics have pretty much stayed the same over the last few thousand years. Yes there has been selective breeding, but that’s not the same as creating whole new species such as in the case of the Cornish Cross chicken, the American Holstein cow, etc. So sheep make superior products from the perspective of those returning to a more ancestral lifestyle.

This means their milk is easier for the human body to glean nourishment from, both orally and topically.

The human body actually absorbs a lot through the skin. It also gets rid of a lot through the skin (if sweat is super stinky, that person needs to detox!) Slowly we are becoming more aware that the beauty and hygiene products we use on our skin directly effects our health. The last few years the Industry has made great strides in marketing towards the growing health conscious world by advertising clean ingredients in soaps and shampoos. The problem is that they still need to make these products shelf stable.

Cottage industry soap making has a much faster expiration date on our products because a lot of us don’t WANT all those preservatives in our skincare. This makes our products superior from a health perspective, but it also means if you buy it, you can’t leave it in your pantry for decades.

Many people who have used my soap have told me their skin not only feels cleaner, but it also feels moisturized. The beeswax works to seal the skin with a thin layer of wax that gives the rest of the fats and oils longer to absorb into the skin. The tallow and lard have essential fatty acids the body needs to create healthy skin and hair cells. The sheep milk has a rich array of B vitamins and minerals that soothe and relax stressed cells and muscle tension and also add more nourishment to create future healthy cells for more beautiful skin.

All in all, we are fans of this product, and have been getting similar feedback from our customers!

we hope you love our soap as much as we do!