CLICK HERE TO SHOP THE DR BRONNER'S RANGE NOW!>
I recently met up with Lisa Bronner, granddaughter of the famous Dr Bronner when she came to visit Australia and I asked her everything I'd always wanted to know about these special soaps.
Speaking on the shift in thinking between 1948 and 2015 Lisa said, ’unfortunately it took something pretty catastrophic, that caught people’s attention. The issue is that a lot of people were starting to ask what is it? People are now looking and realizing how contaminated our food is. How contaminated our personal care products are that we have put on ourselves day after day"
’People will believe what they want to believe, honestly. Sometimes people need some catastrophic event in their life, unfortunately, to start thinking differently. We can appeal to their reason but some people don’t want to change and there is not a whole lot that we can do about that", Lisa explained. ’Unfortunately, it is a choice, though we can definitely be supportive of products that are doing things the right way and that are promoting sustainable practices"
’My family was not the first to create soap", says Lisa of how the range first came about. "The first soaps were made when cooking oil overflowed into the ashes of fire and had a reaction, because soap is oil and sodium hydroxide is in ash", Lisa said. ’The technology of soap is a million years old and it’s like we took the left turn very recently in sort of a modern arrogance, thinking that we knew better than humanity has ever known before and created something that is really making us sick"
So how has Dr Bronner’s changed over the years? ’There are changes but we don’t do them very often. The reasons we do it because there have been advances. For example, the soap used to be a lot darker because as a preservative we used rosemary extracts which are natural but very dark and it only moderately effective."
’We did discover that sunflower oil vitamin E was a much better preservative which was clear. So we took out rosemary and put in sunflower oil. People really thought that we had diluted the soap. It was a lot lighter and my brother was new to the business so he really got a lot of flak because of it. So we told them to let it evaporate and turn solid and you will see that there is not more water in it and it’s the same as the old soap."
’We are very careful about our recipe", Lisa says ’I would say that bottom line it has not changed in 150 years. We call our soap old and improved. Even the label has not changed tremendously."
Want to find out more about Dr Bronner's? Read part 1 of my interview with Lisa here!
CLICK HERE TO SHOP THE DR BRONNER'S RANGE NOW!>
