Looking to clean up with indie soaps for the health-conscious and eco-friendly

Of all the consumer goods cluttering your well-appointed home, one that seems relatively innocuous is soap.

It turns out that this is misleading: Choosing a soap involves a thicket of decisions guided by a full array of factors that define who you are as a consumer.

If a thrifty 99-cent four-pack of store-brand bars represents one end of the spectrum, the Zum Bar represents the other: It sells itself on far more than a banal promise of getting you clean. The Lemongrass variety, for example, aims to please the eye (yellow with swirls of green), nose ("bright, fresh, tangy and herby"), and skin (especially oily skin, in this case). And like all the Zum varieties, it pledges ingredient correctness: no synthetics, just natural stuff like goat's milk, glycerin, and vegetable oils.

There are apparently plenty of buyers who demand all this and will pay more than $5 a bar to get it. Indigo Wild, which makes Zum, distributes its soaps and other aromatherapy products in 2,000 stores, including Whole Foods. Ten years ago, founder Emily Voth was selling it at a Kansas City farmer's market; now she has a 25,000-square-foot facility and dozens of employees.

While unusual in having achieved such scale, Indigo Wild is just one of hundreds, maybe thousands, of businesses that constitute the handmade soap subculture. Websites like Etsy, a marketplace specializing in all things handmade, and IndieFriendly, a directory of "places to shop indie on the Web," include scores of artisan-entrepreneur soap makers.

IndieFriendly is a spinoff of the site Craft Revolution; one founder, Tamara Dourney, happens to be a soap maker herself and explains that many "soapers" start out looking to make their own alternatives to mass-produced soap with a kit bought from a craft store.

And because the process is "kind of addictive," Dourney says, they start selling, often online. That's what she did. Her brand is called Natural Magic Soaps, offering soaps like "Grounded" and "Indian Summer."

For soap makers and connoisseurs, the quest to buy or build an alternative has much to do with the ingredient list. Some find mass soaps too harsh. Others have eco-conscious motivations.

Dourney recently wrote in the soaper-focused Saponifier magazine of the "vehement debate" about such issues. Some soapophiles feel it's OK to use certain artificial ingredients for fragrance; others insist all ingredients should be from plants.

It's ultimately a matter of "personal beliefs," she says, noting that she is phasing fragrance oils out of her products and anticipates that her core buyers will stick with her. "I'm deciding who my customers will be," she says.

While Voth, the Zum maker, was partly motivated by a personal interest in organic products and aromatherapy, she always wanted her business to grow so she could quit her corporate day job. Soap, she points out, is a promising product for an entrepreneur: Practically everyone uses it every day, and it must be replaced often.

On the other hand, there's a lot of competition -- from the ever-growing packs of indie soapers to mass brands that do more to cultivate a "natural" look and feel than they do to cultivate natural ingredients. So while some consumers are more savvy about what goes into a soap than they used to be, and Voth figures ingredients are a selling point, she's also made sure they aren't the only one.

The snazzy color schemes and scents play to the buyer looking for handmade luxury. Indigo Wild has devised ways to make steadily bigger batches than the typical small soaper (25-pound blocks that are cut into bars after a three-or-four-week "curing" process), but it's still an intensively hands-on process. "That's our advantage," she says. "People cannot mass-manufacture this kind of soap."

Finally, there's the appeal to soap shoppers that has nothing to do with the production process. "We really sell us, our brand," Voth says. The Zum image -- fun, feel-good, and even "somewhat sexy" products -- is reflected on the company's site, packaging, and catalog.

So the company website lists ingredients it won't use -- animal tallow, petroleum, and "any ingredient with laureth or lauryl in the name" -- but the list has the catchy label "Dirty Words" because they're "chemically and syntheticy -- and thus patheticy. " The effect is to pour that all-natural, good-for-you message into a more accessible mold.

"All these natural products were so serious," Voth says, communicating to consumers a message of guilt rather than benefits. "Come on," she says, "Live and let live." After all, it's just soap.

Rob Walker writes the Consumed column for The New York Times Magazine.