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Our world is full of color. Color can be exciting and enticing, or soothing and calming. Think of that box of crayons you cracked open on the first day of school. Or of a deep purple plum, beckoning from the produce aisle. Or of the brilliant blue of a perfect September sky. Velvet black skies and silver stars. Red maple leaves in autumn and bright green shoots in April. It would be a bland world without color.

But, while many of our favorite colors are supplied by nature, it’s a different story in the human-made world. Synthetic colors are often added to manufactured goods, clothing, food, and personal care products to help make them more attractive and marketable.

Adding color where it didn’t exist before, or augmenting subtle colors, isn’t a modern process. We humans have been creating and using natural dyes for nearly all of our history. These natural dyes come from plants: their roots, barks, leaves, and berries. Other natural dyes come from fungi, lichen, insects, and minerals.

As modern manufacturing methods developed, the old ways of adding color proved difficult to mass produce. Natural dyes take resources and time to create and use. Synthetic colors, developed in laboratories, are much easier to produce and apply in quantity.

Over the years, however, the safety of these artificial colors has come into question. Since the 1900s, scientists have been examining the effects of artificial colors, and, over time, the United States has banned the use of dozens of synthetically made colors that were once thought to be safe to eat or use on our skin and are now known to cause problems that range from skin irritation to migraines to cancer.

At Vermont Goat Milk Soap, we’ve made the conscious decision to forgo adding colors to our soaps. Instead, we let the natural ingredients we use supply their own color. When we look at a finished bar of soap, a light golden shade made from combining oils with pure goat milk, we see the most beautiful color of all: pure soap.