Soaping Ingredient Choices

Let's talk about ingredient choices in my soap.

If you are a soaper you probably already heard about palm oil and what's being happening to the poor Orangoutang.  For none soapers, palm oil producers which mainly located in Southeast Asian countries have been destroying Orangoutang's habitats (and killing them) to plant more palm trees.  There has been a big movement of anti-palm oil in the soaping industry or at least moving over to using sustainable source which charges an arm and a leg.

Now, here's my personal feeling about this whole thing, please don't attach me if this does not suit your taste.

I believe in using everything in moderation, who's there to say if we switch to none palm there's not going to be another environmental emergency because all of a sudden some other oil is in HIGH demand and something else is being destroyed?  I don't want to be a hypocrite, I eat meat, I use gasoline, have all fancy electronic toys, wear leather boots, fly airplane burning jet fuel.  The world is grey, not black and white, I'm just human.  Besides, the biggest threat to the environment is us the human anyway. We should boy cut ourselves really.  I'm not going to say poor Orangoutang I'm going to boy cut palm related products and turn around continuing eating my juicy steak and yummy fatty tuna sashimi.

For that said, I'm going to share my soaping ingredient choice philosophy with all my readers.  Unlike a lot of soapers I use a lot of different recipes or formulas for my soap.  All depends on what oil or butter I can get with reasonable prices.  For example, cherry kernel and jojoba used to be affordable 3 years ago, so I formulated to soap with these oil.  Then it got expensive maybe because of the demand or production difficulty, I moved on.  Then there was the hazelnut, peach kernel, then pistachio, macadamia nut and walnut.  Have you checked the prices for these oils lately?!  And now even olive oil price is hiking up!  When I finish soaping with the ingredients that are no longer feasible I move on to find something else and reformulate.  I guess I would classify myself as a "seasonal" soaper as soaping with seasonal ingredients.  I always maintain variety of soap recipes, some with palm some without, some vegan some not.  I am very flexible and adoptable.  I experiment on ingredients all the time.  There are thousands of trees in a forest why stick to one specific tree?