Rice milk has a long history in skincare traditions across East Asia, where rice water and rice milk have been used for centuries as part of bathing and beauty rituals. At Eternal Sunday, we make our own rice milk in-house by blending cooked rice with water, then use it to replace roughly half of the water phase in our Rice Milk and Honey Comforting Soap.
Why we make it ourselves
Rather than sourcing a commercial rice milk product, we cook rice and blend it with water to create the liquid ourselves. This keeps the ingredient simple and means we know exactly what's going into the formula: rice and water, nothing else. It's a small example of how some of our most distinctive ingredients are also our most straightforward.
What it contributes
Rice milk carries starches and a small amount of natural sugars into the soap batter. In cold-process soap-making, this has a similar (though gentler) effect to the fruit purees we use elsewhere: a softer, slightly creamier lather and a more conditioning skin feel than a water-only equivalent. The starch content also contributes a very fine, silky quality to the bar's lather, distinct from the airier bubbles you get from coconut oil alone.
Used alongside honey in this soap, rice milk reinforces a formula built entirely around comfort and gentleness. Neither ingredient is dramatic on its own, but together they shape a bar that feels noticeably different from our other soaps, softer in both texture and character.
A traditional ingredient, used simply
Rice milk's place in skincare history is well documented, often associated with traditional beauty practices and stories about smooth, soft skin. We don't make specific claims about what rice milk does on contact with skin in a rinse-off product, since contact time is brief. We use it because it's a simple, honestly made ingredient that fits the gentle character of this particular soap, and because making it ourselves keeps the formula as straightforward as the rest of our ingredient list.
In our products
Rice milk currently appears only in our Rice Milk and Honey Comforting Soap, where it's blended fresh in-house and used as part of the water phase. It's one of the more literal expressions of small-batch soap-making we offer: an ingredient made from scratch, in small quantities, for one specific formula.
