7 Benefits of Goat Milk Soap

Goat milk soap has been around for centuries, and it's now having a moment again.

There's a good reason for that. It cleans your skin without stripping it, which is more than you can say for most of the cheap bars lined up on the supermarket shelf.

The short version is this. Most everyday soap leaves your skin feeling tight and itchy because of what it's made from. Goat milk soap doesn't, because of what it's made from.

Here are the real benefits of goat milk soap and what's actually going on.

7 Benefits of Goat Milk Soap

1. It's gentle on sensitive skin

Most people don't realise the cheap bars aren't really soap at all. They're detergent. High pH, the lot of them, and that's the bit that strips your skin.

Goat milk soap is much closer to our skin's own pH. No tight after-feel, no need to slather on moisturiser the second you're out the shower. If your skin tends to kick off at the slightest thing, this is the benefit you'll notice first.

2. It actually moisturises

Goat milk is full of fat and cream. And a proper handmade bar hangs onto its glycerin instead of having it stripped out.

Some soap doesn't have glycerin. Trouble is, it's the glycerin that stops your skin drying out.

Goat milk soap leaves it all in. That's honestly most of the difference, right there.

3. It's kinder to dry, grumpy skin

This is the one everyone seems to search for. Plenty of people with dry skin or eczema find goat milk soap a lot easier to live with than whatever they were using before.

Worth being careful here, though. It isn't medicine and it won't fix anything. But there's simply less in it to wind your skin up in the first place. Less, not more.

4. There's actually decent stuff in it

Goat milk has vitamins A and B in it, a bit of zinc, a bit of selenium. The vitamin A is the one that's linked to helping skin repair itself.

The science gets complicated and most blog posts oversell it, so here's the honest upshot instead. It's still just soap. It just happens to do a bit more than foam up and vanish down the plughole, and your skin tends to feel softer for it.

5. It exfoliates without the scrubbing

There's lactic acid in goat milk, which is a gentle natural exfoliant. It lifts the dead skin off slowly. No grit, no scrubbing, none of those rough bars that feel like you're sanding yourself down.

Exfoliating doesn't have to sting to be working, whatever the harsh scrub brigade would have you believe. Slow and gentle gets you there too.

6. The ingredient list is short

Goat milk, a couple of oils, maybe an essential oil for the smell. That's usually the whole of it.

Now compare that to the back of a supermarket bar, which reads like a chemistry exam.

No synthetic fragrance, no parabens, no sulphates. If you've ever come out in a rash and had no idea what set it off, a short ingredient list makes that detective work a whole lot easier. You can actually see what you're putting on yourself.

7. It leaves your skin's barrier alone

Your skin has a natural layer of oil. It keeps the water in and the muck out, and it's doing that job all day. Harsh soap blasts it off every single wash. Then your skin panics and makes too much oil to make up for it, and round and round it goes. Tight, then greasy, then tight again.

Goat milk soap doesn't do that. It leaves the oil more or less where it is. Give it a fortnight and your skin tends to calm down on its own. That permanent dry, itchy feeling usually just goes.

A few honest bits before you buy

It's dearer than a multipack, no point pretending otherwise. Four to seven quid a bar.

But it lasts if you don't leave it sitting in a wet dish turning to mush. Let it dry out between showers and one bar will see you weeks, which closes the price gap more than you'd think.

Best advice? Buy one. Just the one. Use it for a couple of weeks and see what your skin makes of it. Worst case you're down a fiver and you've learned something.

Best case the after-shower itch packs its bags and doesn't come back.