Is dr squatch bar soap actually worth switching to?

How cold process soap making changes what's actually in the bar

Here's the mechanism buried under the woodsy branding: most of what makes a bar soap feel harsh isn't the soap, it's the process. Mass-market bars are often made by melting a premade soap base, which strips out the glycerin that soap naturally produces during saponification, because glycerin is valuable enough to sell separately in lotions. Cold process skips that step. Oils like coconut and shea are combined with lye and left to cure slowly, at low heat, over days, which keeps the glycerin in the bar instead of pulling it out. That's why a cold process bar can clean without leaving the tight, squeaky feeling a stripped bar does, the moisturizer was never removed in the first place. The second thing worth noticing is the kaolin clay. It isn't a scent additive, it's a mild abrasive, fine enough to slough off dead skin without scratching, which is why the lather feels gritty in a good way instead of slick. Put those two choices together and you get a bar doing two jobs at once, cleaning and lightly exfoliating, using ingredients already built into the formula rather than a separate scrub bolted on for the label. The scent, birchwood breeze, fresh falls, or bourbon barrel, is what you'll notice first, but it's riding on top of a soap made to hold onto what a typical bar-soap process throws away.