It started with my own skin, and a dog named Junior.

Moondog Soap Works began long before it had a name.

I grew up in Eugene in the 1990s, the son of a midwife, surrounded by herbalists, naturalists, gardeners, and people who still believed knowledge belonged in the hands. I went to Waldorf school. I grew up around people who made things, grew things, gathered things, studied plants, and treated nature as something to learn from directly.

In 1995, we lived on a property where spirulina grew in tubes. At the time, that kind of thing felt normal to me: biology, food, medicine, sunlight, water, and human hands all working together. Looking back, I can see how rare that was. I was lucky to grow up around brilliant minds and practical people, and it gave me a deep need to create with my own hands because that was what I had always known.

I am autistic, and I am a bottom-up thinker. I do not really understand a system by being handed the finished explanation. I understand it by taking it apart.

That has shaped everything I make. I need to know what something is made of, where it fails, what holds it together, and what happens when the order changes. I do not trust a recipe just because it is written down. I have to break the idea open, test it, destroy the parts that do not hold, and rebuild it into something I can understand in my own hands.

By 2013, I was experimenting on my own, living close to the land as best I could, and trying to understand what useful things I could make from the materials around me. I worked with rainwater, hardwood ash, plants from the garden, oils, heat, patience, and failure. Junior was still young then, and the work was not about branding or selling anything. It was curiosity, survival instinct, old knowledge, and hands-on chemistry.

That early period taught me something that still runs through every Moondog bar: ingredients matter, but understanding matters more. A material is not just a name on a label. It has a source, a season, a behavior, and a reason for being there. Water is not just water. Oil is not just oil. Ash is not just ash. Plants are not decoration. Every input changes the result, and every result teaches you to pay closer attention.

I believe in entropy as much as negentropy. Things break down. Things organize. A batch can fall apart because of one wrong choice, but it can also teach you exactly why the next one works. That tension is part of the craft for me. I experience materials vividly, almost as if each batch is new, and that keeps me from treating the work like a formula I can stop paying attention to.

In 2020, Youngsang Cho and JADAM brought me back into soapmaking from the agricultural side. JADAM's ultra-low-cost farming philosophy made sense to me because it put practical knowledge back into the hands of growers. It was direct, functional, and grounded in observation.

I began making organic IPM systems built around potassium-based liquid soaps, plant extracts, cinnamon water, chili oil, and carefully balanced potassium fatty acid salts. Those formulas were not cosmetic. They had a job to do in living systems. They were built to help manage soft-bodied insect pressure through functional chemistry: alkali, oils, fatty acid chains, dilution, wetting, contact, and formulation choices that changed what the soap actually did.

That work sharpened the way I thought. Soap was not folklore. It was not just a recipe. It was chemistry with consequences.

Eventually, I turned that same focus toward myself.

My own skin did not tolerate most commercial washes. I did not want harsh synthetic surfactants, synthetic fragrance carriers, overbuilt detergent systems, or a premade base pretending to be a handmade formula. I had already spent years working with soap as chemistry with a purpose. Now I wanted to build something for skin with the same clarity, discipline, and respect for function.

By 2022, I was making soap regularly for myself. Not from kits. Not from shortcuts. From raw oils, with formulas I could understand, adjust, test, and stand behind. I wanted bars that made sense all the way down: the oil profile, the fatty acid balance, the cure, the hardness, the lather, the rinse, and how my skin felt afterward.

That bar became Lunar Cycle, and the rest of the line grew out of it.

That is when the books became important.

Kevin M. Dunn's Scientific Soapmakinghelped sharpen the molecular side: the saponification math, the chemistry, the equations, and the reason formulas behave the way they do. Susan Miller Cavitch's The Soapmaker's Companion and The Natural Soap Bookhelped deepen my understanding of oil profiles, fatty acid balance, and troubleshooting. Anne L. Watson's Smart Soapmaking and Milk Soapmaking helped me refine a low-temperature, controlled method that could be precise without being overcomplicated.

I owe a real debt to those teachers, but Moondog was not born from a book. Their work helped me measure, name, and refine what I had already been chasing for years.

I tested different methods because I needed to understand them, not because I was looking for the easiest path.

I later came to understand, through diagnosis, that this is part of how my mind protects itself. It is a kind of compulsion, but not the destructive kind. It is not a fire. It is a pressure toward certainty. When something catches my attention, I have to know what it is, how it works, where it fails, and what is actually true. For me, facts are not trivia. They are safety.

That can be a burden. Autism, CPTSD, and PTSD shaped me in a world that was not built for people who process life the way I do. But the same mind that made ordinary systems harder to survive also gave me the ability to study, test, and comprehend things with a level of focus most people would call excessive. I have learned to turn that burden into a gift, and eventually into a kind of power.

It also made working for other people harder than it seemed to be for everyone around me. I needed to build something that could hold me up over the long run, on my own terms, a future that did not depend on fitting into a workplace with no room for me.

That is how I approached soap. Not casually. Not halfway. Not by copying a finished method and hoping it worked. I had to take the system apart until I understood it well enough to rebuild it.

Salt bars taught me about hardness and cure. Sugar changed the way I thought about lather. Tallow showed me the structure and richness traditional fats can bring. Cold process from raw oils became the path because it gave me the most control over the finished bar.

There were plenty of failures. Batches seized. Temperatures got away from me. Lye solutions went wrong. Bars refused to cure the way they should have. Some mistakes were frustrating. Some were expensive. All of them were useful.

That is the part I trust most. Failure is not separate from the method. It is part of the method. I learn by seeing what breaks, why it breaks, and what has to change for the structure to hold.

Before soap, I was a chef, and that shaped how I think. A recipe is not a guarantee. It is a starting point. Real craft comes from repetition, correction, instinct, restraint, and knowing when a happy accident is worth keeping.

By 2025, people started asking to buy the leftover bars, the test batches, and even the imperfect ones. That changed the work. What had been personal became public. I had to decide whether I trusted these formulas enough to put my name on them.

The first was my mechanic. I had given him a few bars I made for myself, and a few days later he came back with fifty dollars in hand and a sheepish look, because his wife had sent him back for more. She said it made her want to kiss him again. That is when I understood other people might actually want this. The beard bar, Oberon, was built in earnest after that.

Moondog Soap Works is the result of that decision.

Not because I set out to build a brand, but because the work finally became honest enough to carry one.

A bar of soap is a small thing, but small things can hold a life if they are made with enough attention. This work holds my need to understand from the bottom up, my refusal to borrow a formula and call it mine, my belief that useful things should still pass through human hands. It holds the failures, too. I do not hide those from the process. The failures are where the method became real.

The name came from somewhere deeper than soap.

Moondog is an homage to Roscoe and Junior, father and son, both above now while I remain below. They are part of the sky for me. Part grief, part guidance, part reason to keep looking up.

Roscoe Oxknocker was Junior's father, and between the two of them I had twenty-three years of their company. Junior was my service dog for nearly fifteen of those years, always finding some way to look after me, usually my hands, since they were the ones that came home dirty or carrying some small scratch. He asked for nothing back. The hand bar, Sirius, is named for him: the brightest star in the sky, the faithful one that shows up and stays.

Some of what goes into these bars came down to me a different way. As a child I watched my aunt, who is from Okinawa, rinse her hair in the cloudy water left over from washing rice, the way the women of the island had done for generations before her. That small ritual is why rice runs through so much of what I make. The hair bar, Selene's Dream, grew straight out of it.

In that way, the name is also my own inversion of the Blackfoot story of the Pleiades: not a story I claim as mine, but one whose shape has always stayed with me. Children lifted into the sky. Love becoming stars. The lost remaining visible. Moondog carries my private echo of that feeling: the ones I loved above me, still present, still bright, while I keep working here on earth.

It is also named for a night I have never been able to forget.

A paraselene, or moon dog, is a bright companion light that can appear beside the Moon when moonlight bends through ice crystals high in the atmosphere. It is not the Moon itself. It is the Moon answered back by the sky.

I saw one on a night that felt impossibly still. For once, nothing in me was fighting. Nothing was reaching backward. Nothing was bracing for what came next. The Moon was ringed with pale fire, the world was quiet, and I felt more at peace than I had ever felt in my life.

It was not happiness as an idea. It was happiness as weather. Happiness as light. A moment so complete it felt like my soul had been given a photograph of what peace could look like.

I carry that night with me.

Moondog Soap Works is my attempt to bring some part of it back down to earth: the dogs above, the maker below, the Moon with its ghostly companions, and something made by hand with enough care to hold a little of that light.

What I stand by

I make cold process soap from raw oils, which means every ingredient decision is mine. Palm-free all the way down, including the parts most brands miss. No fragrance, no essential oils, nothing hidden behind a trade-secret label. I do not make claims I cannot back up, and I will tell you plainly what survives the soap-making process and what does not.

If you want the chemistry behind how the bars are built, that lives on each product page under Soapmaking notes, and on the Oils page. This page is just about the person making them.