Beet Root
Part of our Ingredient Glossary — educational information about raw materials we may use in our products. We don't sell raw ingredients.
This entry is part of our Em'z Blendz Ingredient Glossary. We use beet root powder in select bath and body products; we don't sell it raw.
Beet root is a colorant. That's the whole job. We use it because if a product is supposed to look like it came from a kitchen garden, the color should come from one too. Mica is fine. Synthetic FD&C dyes work. But there's something honest about putting a powdered vegetable in a bar of soap and letting that be where the color comes from.
The science is straightforward. Beets contain betalain pigments, the same compounds that turn your fingers pink when you handle a fresh beet. Dehydrated and ground into a powder, those pigments hold their color in acidic conditions but break down in the high-pH environment of cold-process soap. So in our acidic Cranberry Spice & Beetroot Tub Truffle, the powder gives the bath water its rosy hue and earns its keep as a colorant. In our alkaline cold-process Rogue Valley Garden Soap Bar, the powder is in there for a different reason: Andy's mom grows the best beets in the Rogue Valley, and the bar is meant to be her late-summer garden in soap form. Including the beets was the point, even though the color washed out in saponification.
What beet root doesn't do is much for your skin at the concentrations we use it. We're not going to claim it's an antioxidant treatment or a brightening agent. It's a beet that we dried and ground up. Sometimes it colors the product (the Tub Truffle); sometimes it doesn't (the Soap Bar). Both uses earn the ingredient its place: one for visual honesty, one for the simple fact that it came out of the garden the bar is named after.
