Call of the Pleiades

This bar is built around rice bran, jojoba, colloidal oatmeal, green tea, and fine white coffee. Rice bran carries the formula's main oil body and its unsaponifiable fraction. Jojoba belongs here because it is not a triglyceride oil at all, but a liquid wax ester, which makes it a different kind of material inside a richer facial bar.

Colloidal oatmeal gives the bar a soft, creamy texture. Green tea brings the pale botanical note. Fine white coffee adds a light polish and ties the bar back to Moondog's white-coffee identity without turning it into coffee perfume or novelty soap.

The result is the richest facial bar in the line: high-superfat, unscented, fragrance-free, and built around materials chosen for a softer, more finished wash.

The formulation problem is not cleansing in the abstract, but the construction of a high-superfat sodium soap whose detergency is moderated by fatty-acid distribution, retained glycerol, unsaponifiable material, and a controlled non-soap lipid fraction. The finished bar is not an oil blend and it is not a synthetic detergent system. It is a cured, heterogeneous matrix of sodium fatty acid salts, glycerol, reduced water, residual lipid, sodium lactate, wax esters where present, and dispersed botanical material.

The principal reaction is alkaline ester hydrolysis. Sodium hydroxide cleaves triglyceride ester linkages and converts the liberated fatty acids into their sodium carboxylate salts. The glycerol backbone remains as glycerol rather than being removed as in some industrial soapmaking streams. Free fatty acids already present in the oils are neutralized directly to sodium salts. The resulting soap phase is a mixed carboxylate system, not a single surfactant species.

The fatty-acid distribution is the controlling architecture. Rice bran oil contributes a predominantly oleic/linoleic triglyceride profile and a minor unsaponifiable fraction. Coconut oil supplies lauric and myristic acids, whose sodium salts have higher aqueous solubility and stronger lathering behavior than long-chain saturated salts. Olive and sweet almond oils extend the unsaturated C18 fraction. Castor oil contributes ricinoleic acid, 12-hydroxy-9-cis-octadecenoic acid; the hydroxyl group increases polarity and gives sodium ricinoleate its distinctive effect on foam body and persistence. Shea butter contributes stearic and palmitic fractions, whose sodium salts are less soluble and more structural, increasing hardness and body.

The superfat is a stoichiometric decision. The sodium hydroxide charge is calculated below the full saponification value, leaving a residual non-soap lipid fraction after conversion. That fraction may include unsaponified triglycerides, free fatty acids, wax esters, and oil-borne unsaponifiables, depending on the chemistry and SAP behavior of each input. It should not be described as raw oil simply surviving intact; it is the unconverted and partially process-altered residue of a deliberately lye-discounted system.

Jojoba is chemically distinct from the triglyceride oils. It is composed primarily of long-chain wax monoesters rather than glycerol triesters, so it does not enter the saponification calculation in the same way as rice bran, coconut, olive, almond, castor, or shea. In a higher-superfat soap, its most relevant chemical identity is as a wax-ester component of the residual lipid phase.

Rice bran's unsaponifiable fraction includes gamma-oryzanol, a mixture of ferulic acid esters of phytosterols and triterpene alcohols. These compounds are not triglycerides and are not represented by the normal fatty-acid SAP profile. That does not mean every native minor compound passes through high pH unchanged; alkaline hydrolysis can affect esterified phenolics and other labile structures. The precise claim is narrower: the rice bran input contributes a non-glyceride fraction to the cured matrix, distinct from the fatty acids converted into sodium soap.

White coffee, oat, and green tea materials enter as plant-derived solids or extractive fractions, depending on preparation. Insoluble particles remain physically dispersed. Water-soluble fractions partition into the aqueous phase before cure. Alkali-labile compounds may hydrolyze, oxidize, or otherwise degrade. The chemically accurate description is not preservation of raw botanical activity, but incorporation of processed plant material into a high-pH soap matrix.

Sodium lactate is an added sodium carboxylate salt. It is not produced by the triglyceride saponification reaction. In the soap batter it affects ionic strength, water behavior, crystallization, firmness, mold release, and final hardness. In the cured bar it remains part of the soluble salt fraction distributed through the soap matrix.

The finished composition is therefore best described as a cured mixed sodium carboxylate system with retained glycerol, reduced water, lye-discount residual lipid, jojoba wax esters, rice bran unsaponifiables, sodium lactate, and processed white coffee, oat, and green tea material.

Almost everyone grows up with the Greek Pleiades, the seven sisters set among the stars. We tell the older story for this land instead, the one the Niitsitapi (the Blackfoot, the original people of these plains) have kept.

In their tradition the cluster is a group of orphans, the Lost Boys, children no one in the camp would care for. They were left to go without while the people looked after their own, and the only ones who looked after the boys at all were the makoyi (the wolves), who took them in as the rest would not. Their neglect did not go unseen. Natosi (the Sun) grew angry that the people had abandoned their own children, and sent a drought down onto the camp, and the land dried and the iinii (the buffalo) vanished from it, and the people who had withheld their care were left with nothing to eat. It was the makoyi (the wolves) who answered even then, moving to bring the iinii (the buffalo) back to a people who had earned no such kindness. The boys, worn down by a life on earth that had never made room for them, asked Natosi (the Sun) to lift them into the heavens where they could be out of reach of all of it, and there they remain, gathered close in the night sky.

The makoyi (the wolves) could not climb up after them. They stayed below on the dry ground and howled toward the boys they had lost, and that cry, carrying night after night, was meant to keep the people in mind of the children they had failed. That howl is where Moondog takes its name, the sound of the one who stays behind and keeps calling after what everyone else was willing to lose.

The land in that story cracks and goes hungry for want of care, which is the same thing skin does when an industry strips it and sells back what it took. The Pleiades hangs as a cluster of seven, and seven oils sit beneath the name on this bar, rice bran and coconut, olive and sweet almond, castor, shea, and jojoba, each carrying part of the work. It was built to do what the makoyi did: look after the part of you that was left to go without.