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September 11, 2015

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Home » City specials » Hangzhou

Sudsy truth of soap maker’s rise to fame

By Xu Wenwen | September 11, 2015, Friday | Print Edition

EDITOR’S note:

CHINA’S time-honored arts and crafts traditions are being kept alive by a fresh crop of talented, young artists and designers. Across Hangzhou, these emerging artisans are adapting these ancient cultural products to suit modern tastes. Shanghai Daily’s Hangzhou Special is here to put the spotlight on these young innovators.

HU Gefei’s business is cleaning up — literally. The 30-year-old Hangzhou native makes natural soaps and is always on the lookout for new items she can use.

Starting with her first handmade soaps seven years ago, she has since expanded — quitting a well-paid job last year to invest her savings in a soap factory in the city.

She uses many ingredients in her soaps including egg yolk, plant ash from West Africa and brown sugar from Mauritius. While these exotic offerings are popular, her customers have a special attachment to Hu’s osmanthus flower and Longjing tea soaps.

Osmanthus is a tiny, golden flower with a sweet fragrance that blooms in the autumn. It is Hangzhou's city flower and locals use it in tea and as an ingredient in numerous dishes.

“My customers who are from Hangzhou and work elsewhere often tell me the scent of this soap carries the city’s memories,” Hu says.

The soap’s scent helps improve one’s mood, and using osmanthus eliminates skin dullness and sallowness. It also helps sooth rhinitis caused by allergies, according to Hu.

Longjing tea, a city specialty and one of the most popular green teas in China, is an anti-oxidant.

Commercial soaps can be hard on skin, especially those with sensitive skin. Such soaps use chemicals that can dry and damage skin. Regular soaps have the naturally present glycerin removed and replaced with dyes, synthetic fragrances and preservatives. Skin conditions that may cause someone to switch to natural soaps include chronically dry skin, allergic reactions after bathing or an itch that doesn’t go away.

Hu only makes cold-processed soaps, which requires more than a dozen procedures and takes about 45 days.

For Longjing tea soap the dry tea leaves are marinated in camellia oil for 180 days. Then she distills the tea for hydrolat (condensed steam used to infuse water with the essence of beneficial plants), then mixes it with several kinds of oil such as avocado or sweet almond oil depending on the recipe. Then comes the stirring.

“The speed of stirring, the air temperature and the mood of the soap maker all affect the final piece of soap,” Hu says.

Other procedures in the process including standing, cutting, polishing, marking and packaging the soap.

Hu is self taught although she majored in luxury management when studying in France, where she also studied aromatherapy as a hobby. She holds four aromatherapist certificates — one each from France, the UK, US and Germany.

As she learned more about aromatherapy she realized there are many unique soaps in other countries including Marseilles soap in France, hot spring soap from Japan, and India’s sandalwood soap.

“Although China has a rich supply of resources,” she says, “I didn't see any special soaps on the market like those in other countries."

She remembers making her first piece of soap seven years ago, something she describes as an epic failure, but a necessary part of the learning process. Since soap making involves organic chemistry, and new elements may come out during experiments, Hu says that trial and error is all a part of the process.

Still, she believes “good things are worth the wait,” noting it took more than six months to develop the Longing tea soap with a scent that wasn’t too light, yet had stable color retention.

She also says cold processing has other benefits.

“Foods like milk, juice or eggs do not go rotten once made into soaps. A natural soap is actually better if it isn’t used for years,” she says.

Hu is also proud that Hangzhou government officials have purchased her osmanthus and Longjing tea soaps to give as gifts representative of the city. This has sparked a new opportunity with Hu researching and developing tailor-made soaps for other cities. One of her latest creations is wolfberry soap for Ningxia, a northwestern autonomous region considered the home of the wolfberries known as gouqi in Chinese.

She also has a line of seasonal soaps including lotus leaf for summer and ginger for winter. Some soaps include edible bird nest to help moisturize skin. She also makes a soap with human breast milk so mothers don’t waste their milk. This can only be a customized order for nursing mothers. Hu does not make it for commercial sales. Over the years she has expanded her product line to include natural bath salts and lotions.

She has also opened a spa, which, naturally, only uses the products she researched and developed.

“It is my destiny,” she says.

“My destiny pushed me to open the company. Now my aim is to be ‘the queen of soap’."

Hangzhou


 

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