The Parypa family is Alice, 6, Gretchen, 10; Tobin, 9; Hannah, Samuel, 4 and Ryan.
Alice Parypa, 6, tries out a new soap cutter.
Hannah Parypa cuts soap.
The drying rack at Dirty Man Soap Co.
If increased daily handwashing has your skin feeling tight, dry, or even cracked and bleeding, Hannah Parypa has the solution.
Parypa, owner of Dirty Man Soap Company of Chehalis, has been marketing homemade soap to the public since 2014. She explained that many commercial soaps contain chemicals that can be irritating and damaging to skin.
“When you’re washing your hands a lot with other soaps, your hands tend to dry out because a lot of the soaps that are sold out there are detergent based, so its stripping and drying your hands,” Parypa said.
It was a wish to banish more chemicals from her family’s home that led Parypa to make her first batch of soap in 2012. They were gifted with a homemade bar of soap from a friend and Parypa’s husband, Ryan, suggested she could try her hand at the process. She said she instantly loved the idea.
“I was looking for something to do while I was home and homeschooling our four kids,” she recalled.
After making several successful batches of soap for her family, Parypa said the only problem she had was too much soap for her one family to use. She started Dirty Man Soap Company in 2014, at first just offering handmade bar soap. In the last six years, the company has grown to encompass deodorant, lotion bars, beard grooming products and insect repellents.
What separates Dirty Man from many commercial soaps is that they are free from parabens, chemical foaming agents (such as Sodium Lauryl Sulfate) and preservatives (such as Triclosan), just to name a few. In fact, Parypa said the only synthetic ingredients she uses are a few fragrances, when purchasing the essential oil scent would make the completed soap too costly for consumers (their bar soaps retail for about $6 each). Even in those rare occasions, the non-essential oil fragrances are the most naturally sourced available.
Parypa is the main soap maker, though she is sometimes assisted by kids Gretchen, 10, Tobin, 9, Alice, 6, and Samuel, 4.
Ryan Parypa also helps his wife by building “everything from the soap molds to tools to get it out of the molds,” she said.
Much of the ingredients and fragrances come straight from the Parypas’ small Chehalis farm or are locally sourced. Some of Parypa’s first soaps used local beers for scents. All of her soaps start with a combination of tallow the family renders themselves, coconut oil, rice bran oil, sunflower oil and certified sustainable palm oil. A batch of soap takes about two hours to create, but then needs to sit in a mold for 24 hours. The block is then cut into bars of soap, which have to cure for three to four weeks before they are ready for consumers. The finished soaps come in a variety of scents, from the traditional vanilla and cedarwood to more unusual such as the charcoal infused detox soap, to one of Parypa’s personal favorite’s — Sugared Spruce, to the whimsically named and rainbow-colored Unicorn Farts.
Parypa explained that it is their mixture of oils and tallow that makes each bar of soap long lasting. It is also that combination that keeps the soap from drying out the skin. She said she has many friends who are nurses who use her soap because it cares for their skin.
“We do a lot of gardening and my hands would get so cracked they’d bleed, but now my skin stays softer,” Parypa said of using her own soaps.
It is recommended that one of the ways people can keep themselves healthy, especially during the current outbreak of COVID-19 is to wash their hands frequently with warm water and soap for 20 seconds. Dirty Man Soap Company’s soaps are not antibacterial but Parypa said they do not need to be to help people. Outside of a healthcare setting, the national Centers for Disease Control and the Food and Drug Administration have ruled that the ingredients in antibacterial soaps have no added benefit to consumers over non-antibacterial soaps. That is because the soaps and warm water act as a surfactant, making it difficult for germs to adhere to the skin.
“It’s just as effective as antibacterial soap,” Parypa said of her soap.
