Haslinger Soap Reformulated.
Got into Vienna, Austria this afternoon and just came back to the hotel from a quick trip to Haslinger Seifen to stock up on some soaps.
I also wanted to find out what the real reason was that Haslinger reformulated their soaps and would like to share the information with you.
Haslinger is not that easy to find, so if you want stock up on soaps you better memorize the house number, otherwise you may just walk past as I did initially. Their office is on the first floor of a nondescript building and you need to ring the bell.
Once I had found the place, they were very friendly and the proprietor took quite some time to answer my questions and seemed to appreciate my curiosity and interest in soaps.
In a nutshell, the real reason that they finally dropped tallow from their soaps is that they finally could.
Haslinger uses natural ingredients and while they don’t mind using animal products (e.g. sheeps milk), their philosophy is to rather avoid using products that can only be obtained if the animal is killed.
They had been working for quite some time on a tallow-free soap, but it took them some time to get it right.
Once they found the right formula, they sent unmarked samples of their new and existing soap to distributors and challenged them to tell which one performed better.
According to Haslinger, the distributors could not tell and based on that feedback Haslinger went ahead with their reformulated soaps.
Having alternated for the last few days between their tallow and tallow-free shaving soaps, I made the same observation and cannot really tell from my shave which one is which.
Another useful tidbit of information was that - unless the soap contains free oils - the shelf life of soaps is almost unlimited, although the scent may grow weaker over time. That is probably the explanation why most of us can keep soaps for years on end without any ill effects, but why some soaps (e.g. Cella) are sometimes reported to go bad. I suspect that Cella is a soap where some batches contain enough free oils that the soap can go rancid over time.
As far a palm oils are concerned, Halsinger pointed out that they are using palm kernel oil, which is a by-product of palm oil extraction, and that according to Haslinger even the WWF agrees that at present their is no more environmentally friendly alternative to palm oil available in sufficient quantities.
All in all, a very interesting visit.
If you should want to drop by to buy soaps, bring cash as their sales room on the first floor is quite small and they are not set up to take credit cards.
B.
