Very lively discussion here.
Just to give you a clue as to where I'm coming from, generationally & culturally speaking: I am a 67 y.o. woman who grew up in California, USA, the firstborn and only daughter with 5 brothers. As a kid, I lived in the forest, played in the dirt, climbed trees, swam in the slough, rode my bike on dirt trails, climbed stacks of baled hay so we could jump off of them, milked cows, rode horses, fed chickens, played with dogs and cats whenever I could and was generally an all-around Tomgirl even after we moved to the suburbs, where I played street football in addition to anything else I could get into that had me changing my dirty clothes so often. And I am the mother of two sons, both very active boys, who built skateboard ramps, tore apart and rebuilt bicycles on a whim; we camped and climbed mountains together, as well as various other things that generally get kids dirty. I am also a retired Registered Nurse. But I graduated from Nursing School in the last century 40 years ago, so my training is not as current as nurses with more recent degrees.
So now that you know that about me, hopefully I can safely ask this question. When did it become taboo to use regular soap on babies? I don't really know. Truthfully, I never heard this before I came to this forum. Of course my nurse's training never addressed this idea and nurseries do continue to wash newborns with more than just water.
But
here is an abstract (published in the US National Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health database) which specifically addresses the issue so I will defer to the researchers on that topic. (I retired before this was published, so maybe it is a fairly recent trend, this no soap for infants thing.)
Anyway, of course I understand the question, 'what do you do for 2 years?' as I was surprised to read so many responses about using soap on babies when I first started reading here. I didn't say anything because there just aren't many babies in my circle these days. But I still wondered, which is why I did a little research with my handy dandy search engine.
Would I change the fact that my mom used soap on me and my brothers, or that I used soap on my sons, or even that we used soap on my grandchildren? No, I would not. For one thing, the soap my mom used was not the 'soap' you buy at the stores today, nor do I think the soap I bought when my sons were small was the same as is sold in stores today, either. As far as I can tell, my grandchildren survived regular soap just fine, too. I have no idea if my great-grand-daughter was born before or after these 'newfangled ideas' about soap and infants came about. She is 6 years of age now and I just never heard anything about the use or non-use of soap for her.
Regarding CP vs HP, I do have feelings about both. I started doing HP because it seemed easiest at the time. But I can tell you in the summertime here in Illinois, CP doesn't heat up my house like HP does, so I do prefer doing CP now that the weather has begun to turn Hot and Humid. I do still use HP to re-batch when necessary, but learning to do CP has been fun, too.
I don't think that I find I have more clean-up with HP than I do with CP, really. Most of my weights can be done in the crockpot by just setting it on top of my scale, so I don't really need to use more containers for measuring than when I do CP. In fact when doing multiple colors in CP soap, I have a lot more clean-up to do than when doing a fairly simple HP recipe. But that might be because I don't use disposable plastic cups to mix colors into my soaps. If I did, I could just toss those in the trash. (But that just goes against my nature.) However given the same recipe and a single color soap, I find that the clean-up for CP and HP remains about equal. But maybe that's just me. And also, I've been used to cleaning crockpots almost every day for years anyway because I make all my homemade soups in crockpots (I have 2, one for soap, one for food) and I make soup frequently.
As far as mildness or gentleness to the skin, I really believe it makes no difference what process is used, that it depends totally on the ingredients used in the formula when making the soap.
For me, my skin really does not like high content coconut oil soaps. I have made many different recipes and will continue to try more variations of oil mixtures in my soapmaking journey because I am having so much fun. But so far I have found that my skin likes a bar that is less cleansing and that really has nothing to do with the amount of superfat. It's more about the combination of various fatty acids in the various oils that go into the bar. CP or HP, I'm pretty sure the same formula will come out the same at the end of cure, so I really don't believe the process matters when it comes to what makes my skin feel good about a soap.
I also find that CP offers more opportunities for more colorful and fancier designs in soap. It can be done to some extent in HP, and I have done some, but I am seeing a greater expanse of creative opportunity in CP soapmaking than I have in HP. Plus I really enjoy the process of learning a new and creative skill and the experimentation process involved. That last can be done in all methods of soapmaking, I believe. I have yet to explore much with LS. That's the one that seems really complex and more difficult to me. I have done LS only once. But I may want to create my own liquid shampoos in the future. Maybe when the weather turns cold again, I may try that.
In the end, I'll wager that working so hard to end up with a specific super-fat is more than likely much ado about nothing.
