Is Palm Oil Bad for You in Soap? Where Mountain Sky Stands

Palm oil is one of the most debated ingredients in the natural products industry. Customers ask us about it regularly almost every day, in fact and the question deserves a more complete answer than a simple yes or no.

Here's our honest position.

WHY PALM OIL IS IN SOAP

Palm oil has been used in soap-making for a very long time, and for good reason. It contributes hardness to bar soap and produces a stable, creamy lather. Without a solid fat in the formula, cold-process bar soaps tend to be soft, quick to dissolve, and less pleasant to use. Historically, soap makers used lard or tallow animal fats for this purpose. Palm oil is the plant-based alternative that took over as consumer demand for vegan products grew.

Mountain Sky uses three main oils in our bar soaps: olive oil, coconut oil, and palm oil in roughly equal parts. Each plays a specific role. Olive oil is conditioning and slow-lathering. Coconut oil hardens the bar and creates quick, abundant lather. Palm oil provides additional hardness and a smooth, creamy feel.

Without the palm oil, we would need to use more coconut oil, which produces a harder but more drying bar. Or we'd need to introduce other solid fats, most of which have their own environmental or sourcing concerns. There is no straightforward substitute that performs identically.

THE ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEM

The concern with palm oil is real and serious. Conventional palm oil production has been linked to large-scale deforestation in Southeast Asia primarily Indonesia and Malaysia with direct consequences for biodiversity, greenhouse gas emissions, and the habitat of endangered species including orangutans, Borneo pygmy elephants, and Sumatran tigers.

This deforestation happens because palm is an extremely productive oil crop. One hectare of oil palm produces significantly more oil per year than comparable crops like soy or canola. The economic incentive to clear land and plant palm is powerful, particularly in regions with limited regulatory oversight and high rates of poverty.

We are not dismissing these concerns. They are legitimate, well-documented, and worth taking seriously.

WHERE WE STAND

Mountain Sky purchases RSPO-certified sustainable palm oil. The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil is an international certification body that sets standards for responsible palm production, including protections for forests with high conservation value, prohibitions on clearing peatlands, and requirements for fair treatment of workers and local communities.

RSPO certification is imperfect. Critics including some environmental organizations argue that the standards aren't enforced rigorously enough, that certified and uncertified supply chains are sometimes mixed, and that "sustainable" palm still represents expansion of industrial agriculture into sensitive ecosystems. These are fair criticisms, and they're worth knowing.

Our position is that RSPO-certified palm is meaningfully better than uncertified conventional palm, that eliminating palm from our formula entirely would require replacing it with other oils that carry their own environmental costs, and that complete transparency about our sourcing is the least we can do.

We'd rather tell you the honest, complicated truth than pretend the issue doesn't exist.

THE BIGGER PICTURE

Palm oil is in roughly half of all packaged products sold in North American supermarkets — baked goods, margarine, chocolate, cosmetics, cleaning products. The palm that goes into a bar of soap represents a very small fraction of total global consumption. Changes in how food manufacturers source palm oil would have a far greater environmental impact than eliminating it from soap formulas.

That's not an argument for complacency. It's context.

If you choose to avoid all palm oil for ethical reasons, we respect that decision fully. Our liquid castile soap contains no palm oil it's made with olive oil, coconut oil, and canola oil and is a complete daily-use option if palm is a dealbreaker for you.

For customers who want to continue using our bar soaps, we will continue purchasing RSPO-certified palm, pushing for stronger certification standards, and being honest about what we know and what remains uncertain.

The question "is palm oil bad?" doesn't have a clean answer. What we can say is that we take it seriously, we source responsibly, and we'll keep telling you exactly what's in our products and why.