Freedom Soap takes a pure path to being an Alabama Maker
Chasity Curtis makes Freedom Soap in her Birmingham home.
Freedom Soap Company, Birmingham
From her home in the Glen Iris neighborhood of Birmingham, Chasity Curtis, age 36, has turned her quest for all-natural beauty products into a growing business. Using ingredients from her own garden, this former schoolteacher and new mother produces up to 60 pounds of artisan soap a week. And the only thing that gets her lathered up are products that claim to be natural, but aren’t.
The Maker: Chasity Curtis
Curtis started making her own soap and skincare products because she had a hard time finding an all-natural beauty line she could afford. As an elementary school teacher, she didn’t have a lot of disposable income, and she found she couldn’t always trust the soaps and creams that claimed to be natural.
“I found that a lot of the so-called ‘natural’ products on the market aren’t really. They’re still loaded with artificial fragrances and sulfates,” she says. “I was trying to take care of myself otherwise – exercising, eating organically – so it didn’t make a lot of sense to put chemicals on my skin.”
She experimented for over a year and washed “a lot of money down the drain” before she got the recipe right.
“My business was born in the teachers’ lounge,” Curtis says. In 2012, she tried to sell a batch of her soaps to her coworkers. They loved it. After a year of successfully peddling her wares to her fellow teachers, she decided to quit her job to make soap full time.
“Being in Birmingham, I feel like I’m at the right place at the right time,” she says. “I grew up in Mobile, but moved here 10 years ago from Atlanta. It’s been awesome being a part of the growing makers movement here.”
The Product: Artisan Soap
As you might expect, you’ll only find natural ingredients in Freedom Soap Company products. Curtis is strict about that.
“My soap is free of preservatives, of synthetic fragrance, of colorings. That’s part of where the name ‘Freedom’ came from,” she says. “The soaps are free of all the nasty chemicals you find in beauty products.”
From start to finish, her soap takes a month to produce. She starts with her base (a blend of coconut, olive, castor and sunflower seed oils) and then mixes in essential oils and herbs (calendula, lavender, rosemary, several types of mint, yarrow – whatever’s in season) that she grows in her own garden or gets from local farmers.
“We try to use ingredients and things that are indicative of the South, that are kind of place-based, that feel Southern,” she says. She then pours the soap into molds where it hardens and undergoes saponification (the process of actually turning to soap). She cuts the soap into bars and cures them on a rack for about 30 days.
Her bestsellers are the Lavender, Sage + Lemon, and Activated Charcoal (a detoxifier made with burnt bamboo). When asked about her personal favorites, she says, “It changes with my mood. I always have at least three bars going at once. Right now I’m using a cornmeal soap that I love. It’s made with organic cornmeal for exfoliating and scented with grapefruit and lavender essential oils.”
Alabama Makers: Freedom Soap Company from Alabama NewsCenter on Vimeo.
Freedom Soap Company, P.O. Box 59107, Birmingham AL 35259
Freedomsoaps.com
Email: info@freedomsoaps.com
Take Home: Artisan Soap, $8
Alabama Makers explores the artisans, crafts people, carpenters, cooks, bakers, blacksmiths, designers and others making original and extraordinary items in our state. If you know an Alabama Maker, let us know at alnewscenter@outlook.com.
