About Us

Handmade Luxury Soaps

We are mad about soap and hope you are too.  We want you to feel secure in the knowledge that we follow all legislation and best practice when creating our cosmetic products for your use, and so we have given you a quick outline below of what is required to bring you a safe product. 

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Holly and Willow follow all necessary legislation and best practice to ensure you receive a product that is safe for your skin.  It is a legislative requirement of anyone manufacturing and selling cosmetic products to be in possession of a CPSR (cosmetic product safety report).  This is issued by a chartered chemist after a full review of the product, recipes and ingredients, allergens, safe raw material usage, packaging and other paperwork from raw material suppliers such as safety data sheets.  At Holly and Willow, we have ensured our cosmetic products are all assessed and certified by chartered chemists, and we follow all rules and IFRA (International Fragrance Association) requirements.

Before any of our products become available for sale, we also follow government legislation that requires all of our products to be uploaded to the UK Cosmetics Portal.  This means full details of our products and other necessary information is available by UK authorities whenever necessary.  

We are required by law to have available on our premises at all times, full details of our products, their recipes, related raw material paperwork and our manufacturing process.   In addition, our candles, reed diffusers and wax melts are all made in line with CLP legislation.  We are full insured.  When you buy one of our products, you can be reassured that you are in safe hands.   

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We use clays and micas to provide design and colour.  We try to stay as natural as we can, although we do make use of some fragrances and also synthetic mica.  There is much debate around mica.  As a company, we have chosen to go with synthetic mica due to human rights issues surrounding the mining of natural mica.  The mica we use is nature identical but made in a lab.  As it is made from natural minerals, it does not pose an environmental issue of micro plastics entering the waterways that other colourings can do.

The benefits of using synthetic mica in product terms is that the synthetic mica is cleaner and does not contain natural metal contamination.  Most importantly however, using synthetic mica reduces the terrible child labour issues that occur with mica mining.  Due to their small size, children as young as 4 and 5 years old are sent down mines to mine natural mica, and Holly and Willow would not have this on our conscience.