About Us!
Hi there! We are Ryn & Ram's Soaps LLC, a sustainable, handmade, and charitable soap business! Since December 2022, the two of us have been designing and producing cold process soaps with local ingredients. We aim to use as many locally sourced, sustainable ingredients as we can to ensure we make the highest quality soaps made from Northern Virginian ingredients. At the same time, we are constantly looking for ways to give back to our local communities as a small business. We have made a range of different charity soaps that allowed us to donate to different local charities. The two of us are extremely honored to make products that not only have local ingredients, but give back to local communities at the same time.
Our soaps are a culmination of so many significant aspects of our lives. From wanting to start a hemp-based business, pursuing the science of soap making, learning to hand process beef fat into tallow, designing each batch, and building our product and business from the ground up, this business centers the values and creativity of Ryn and Ram. We want to make fun and enticing bars with a range of scents and colorants that will nurture your skin, while the profits are used to benefit those around us. We appreciate you taking the time to read about our business and we hope you enjoy the soaps!
Sincerely,
Ryn & Ram
What is Cold Process Soap?
The three main ways of making soap at home are melt and pour, hot process, and cold process. Melt and pour, as it sounds, is a pre-made soap base that can melted to add colors or fragrances and then poured into a mold of your choice. Hot and cold process soap on the other hand, involves mixing a ratio of oils to lye to create soap. In these process the oils and lye undergo a chemical reaction, known as Saponification, that makes the entirely new product known as soap! While lye on its own is an extremely dangerous caustic material, once it is mixed in the correct ratio with oils to saponify into soap it becomes completely safe to use on the skin.
Hot process soaps are mixed at a higher temperate than cold processed soaps, changing the soap making process and curing times. We prefer to work with the cold process method since it allows us to create more designs with our bars! With a more liquid soap batter before it cures, we can pour it in a variety of methods to get different swirl patterns! Using these methods also allows us to change and develop our recipes. We are able to adjust the types and amounts of oils we use in our bars allowing us to be in control of how nourishing, moisturizing, or cleansing each bar is. While making cold process soaps takes about 4-6 weeks to fully cure, we prefer to have control over the designs and ingredients in our bars.
Sustainable Soap Making
Sustainability is central to every aspect of our business. We aim to use natural, local ingredients whenever possible and limit waste in doing so. As soap makers we want our product to benefit the user while not actively harming the environment (or your skin!). The production of commercial soaps is extremely harmful to the environment and many commercial soaps have chemical additives that weaken your skin's barrier. Both of us have had negative reactions to a number of different soaps, and wanted to make a soap that both of us could safely use. As we developed a soap recipe that would benefit different skin types, we wanted to find ways to reduce waste from local communities. In doing so, we found that many waste products from a number of industries can be recycled in soap making. Our Beef Tallow and Coffee Grounds are two main ways that we are able to reduce waste in our soap making.
Beef Tallow, made from beef fat trimmings, is usually thrown out by butchers in the meat packaging industry. While this tallow can be rendered for cooking, it can be further rendered for soap making. This allows us to turn a waste product into a completely useable material! We get our Beef Tallow from Smith Meadows Farm in Berryville, VA, and you can read more about our process in the section below!
Our coffee grounds are also a waste material that we're able to repurpose in many of our soaps. Coffee grounds are often viewed as waste and thrown out by coffee shops since they can't be rebrewed. While there are many ways to reuse coffee grounds, we have found they make a wonderful exfoliating texture in our soaps. We ask Cuppi Coffee in Bristow, VA to donate their used coffee grounds in order for us to use! After drying the grounds, we're able use them as a natural colorant and exfoliant in our soaps!
While these are only small ways to reduce waste from our local communities, we are constantly striving to make our business as sustainable as possible. As we bevel each individual bar we collect the soap shavings to be used in our Zero Waste soap! This is another small way we can prevent creating our own waste and recycle while making soap!
So...Beef Tallow?
What is Beef Tallow?
Beef Tallow is made from fat trimmings that are rendered down. As butchers make different cuts of meat, they trim off excess fat that is undesirable to consumers. While most of the fat is thrown away, it is sometimes saved for cooking. When the fat is rendered down for cooking, all of the remaining bits of meat are removed out so that the fat becomes a solid oil. However for soap making, we continue to render the oil until it is completely free of any impurities and will not have a smell!
How do we make Beef Tallow?
We get our fat trimmings from Smith Meadow Farms in Berryville, VA and then render it into tallow. We combine the fat with water and salt, and then heat it for several hours to draw out impurities in the oil. Once the oil cools on top of the water, we remove it and look at the cross section of the tallow to check its quality. After several days of rendering the oil down, adding more water and salt to draw out all the minute impurities, we are left with a solid block of oil that we can use for soap making!
So why use it?
Beyond Beef Tallow's ability to be extremely moisturizing without a greasy residue, it can also help to naturally repair your skins barrier. It makes your skin feel soft and renewed, especially if your skin is dry or cracked. Regularly using Beef Tallow soaps can even help oil-based perfumes last longer on your skin!
In addition to this, using Beef Tallow in our soaps allows us to honor the generations of soap makers that came before us. For centuries, the soap makers before us would use whatever oils they had available to them in order make their soap. While we have a wide variety of oils to choose from now, we love using a local product that connects us to the origins of soap making. As the industrial meat packaging industry views beef fat as waste, we want to remind consumers that just because you aren't eating it, that doesn't inherently mean it's waste!
If you'd like to know more...
The long version of about us
The two of us started making soap in December 2022 in the basement of a townhouse next to George Mason University. We decided to start making soap when Ram came...
The long version of about us
The two of us started making soap in December 2022 in the basement of a townhouse next to George Mason University. We decided to start making soap when Ram came...
The Ryn of Ryn and Ram - Meet Kathryn!
Hi there! I'm Kathryn/Ryn! I've grown up in Northern Virginia my entire life, falling more in love with the beautiful nature in the Shenandoah Valley and Blue Ridge Mountains every...
The Ryn of Ryn and Ram - Meet Kathryn!
Hi there! I'm Kathryn/Ryn! I've grown up in Northern Virginia my entire life, falling more in love with the beautiful nature in the Shenandoah Valley and Blue Ridge Mountains every...
The Ram of Ryn and Ram - Meet Ramish!
Hello and Salaam! I'm Ramish (or Ram)! I was born in Pakistan, but before my first birthday, my family moved to Quebec, Canada, where I spent the first 12 years...
The Ram of Ryn and Ram - Meet Ramish!
Hello and Salaam! I'm Ramish (or Ram)! I was born in Pakistan, but before my first birthday, my family moved to Quebec, Canada, where I spent the first 12 years...