FAQ

What's Burly Stone about?

We are an artisinal soap & men's grooming products company. 

At Burly Stone we make hand crafted soap with decidedly masculine scents & styles - no girly smells, no cutesy imprints. We're not talking little "guest bathroom" sized bars of soap - screw that. Our bars weigh in at a massive 10 ounces. They're a little rough around the edges  & smell like leather, tobacco, bay rum or other awesome rugged scents. But just because they're not "pretty", don't think for one second that they don't look cool, or aren't good quality. We've worked long & hard to come up with bars of soap that leave your skin looking & feeling great. And remember - we mix, pour, cut & package every bar of Burly Stone soap by hand. How freakin' cool is that?

We also make incredibly high quality beard elixirs, using ingredients like Sweet Almond Oil, Jojoba Oil, & Buckthorn Extract. They condition & soften even the wildest of beards, and moisturize the skin beneath. Man, they feel good.

Then there are our hand balms. We work with our hands a lot, and they take a beating during the day. Developing these hand balms was a matter of necessity. We took great ingredients like beeswax, shea butter & grapeseed oil and added beneficial essential oils for scent. The result is a hand balm that softens & heals the roughest of hands.

But that's not the end of it. We've got lots of other cool stuff we're working on. Solid cologne, pre-shave oils, shaving soap, shaving cream, lotions & more. We won't rest until every guy looks & feels sexy as hell. And we promise that we will NEVER make anything that we don't use ourself.

Simply put, Burly Stone is grooming from a guy's point of view.

How do you make your soaps?

Soap is a funky mix of science & art.

First the science. When oils and/or fats are combined with sodium hydroxide (lye) & water, a process called saponification occurs. The end result of this is soap. Yay science! Yay for possibly deadly chemicals! It's crazy, but that's really all there is to it. A lot of people are concerned about lye, and don't think of soap made this way as "natural" or "healthy". Here's the deal - ALL soap is made this way. When mixed in the proper ratios and allowed to cure properly, the lye is fully absorbed & converted, and there is absolutely no danger to using it. So take a Xanax, people.

We make our soap using the cold process method. All this means is that we don't apply any heat during the saponification process. We mix our ingredients (carefully - we don't relish the idea of our skin melting off, or blinding ourselves), pour the soap into our molds & wait for saponification to occur. When the soap has set up, usually in 24-48 hours, we unmold it, slice it & let it cure for a minimum of 4 weeks. The curing process is incredibly important; it's when the soap mellows, removing even the slightest traces of harsh chemicals. Excess water also slowly evaporates while curing, making the bars of soap harder & longer-lasting.

Now for the art. During the mixing process, every bar of Burly Stone soap has something added to it to improve it in some way. Fragrance oils or essential oils for scent, colorants for visual interest, milk (cow, goat, soy, etc) for skin softening, oatmeal for exfoliation - the list is almost endless. We take a lot of pride in the variety we've put into our different soaps.

What ingredients do you use for your soaps?

We use a combination of olive oil, palm oil, coconut oil, sunflower oil and castor oil for most of our soaps. We've settled on a few different recipes that we think give a good mix of benefits. Some of our soaps have goats milk, or colloidal oatmeal too. Check the labels/descriptions for specifics. And then there's The Dude - our best selling soap that's made with a stout beer instead of water. Yep, a beer based soap.

All of our soaps also have a variety of fragrance oils, essential oils & natural colorants. Some people only want essential oils for scent, but we found them to be too limiting. You can't get blood from a stone, and you can't get an essential oil that smells like leather. It just aint gonna happen. But all of the oils we use have been thoroughly tested (either on our own dainty bodies, our willing (human) guinea pigs) & are safe for use in soap. We don't buy from crappy suppliers, trust us.