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Pork in my soap?

Come on! Who cares?! It's not like I'm eating it, right? . . .


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Many who have come to an understanding against the ingesting of unclean animals have neglected to notice that we're slathering our bodies with the fat of unclean animals on a daily basis. In fact, many of the soaps that we use to "CLEAN" ourselves are made from "UNCLEAN" animals.
In the context of unclean animals, Leviticus 11 verse 8 reads "...Their flesh you shall not eat, and their carcasses you shall not touch. They are unclean to you."
Yes, that's right, the commandment says that we are not even to TOUCH an unclean carcass. It may sound a little extreme at first, but God knows our bodies better than we do. After all, He made us. Unclean carcasses are not fit for ingestion into our bodies. Given the fact that our skin is porous, much of what we touch with our skin is also getting absorbed into our system.
I was shocked when I realized that many of the products in my bathroom, kitchen, and closets contained pork. Have you ever had a glass of water and gotten that unpleasant taste of soap residue that wasn't completely rinsed away? If you're not careful about your dish detergents, you may have inadvertently ingested pork fat. We often check for unclean ingredients in our food, but unclean ingredients can also be found in lotions, soaps, shampoos, deodorants, dish soap, laundry detergent, household cleaners, and on and on. Remember, God says not to even touch the stuff.The big difficulty with removing unclean animal ingredients from your home is that many labels are practically written in a foreign language. After all, it doesn't sound too appealing to tell your consumers that they're washing their children's hair with a fatty substance taken from the stomachs of pigs, so, instead, they call it stearic acid. Even if you somehow manage to learn all of the scientific names of every possible ingredient that could come from an unclean source, you'll still have difficulties because many of the animal derived ingredients such as stearic acid and glycerin have vegetarian versions.
For a while I struggled with cosmetic dictionaries and attempting to carefully scrutinize the labels of my personal products, but the only real way to be sure you're not smearing pork fat all over your skin is to contact the companies. You have to research them BEFORE you go to the store, because when you look at the labels, most of us are not going to have a clue what the ingredients really are. The whole process can be quite cumbersome. Thus this list was born. Some of the companies make the information freely available on their websites, some of the companies I had to contact, and some of the companies I got from a list on Peta's Caring Consumer web site. Of course, I'd like to be able to list a lot more companies on here, but there just isn't the time to contact them all. If you have updated information or information on other companies that you would like to share, please feel free to contact me and I will update the list as soon as I can. Obeying God in today's society can be quite difficult and I am hoping that this list can help make at least one part of it a little bit easier.

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