Soapmaking, especially with cold-process, can seem a bit daunting when we consider that Fight Club has seriously made all of us think lye equals a horrifying death.
In all reality lye is an essential aspect of soap! We cannot make real soap without.
To start with you will need to have the basic tools to make soap, you can find that blog post here.
Ingredients
- Shea Butter
- Cocoa Butter
- Olive Oil
- Coconut Oil
- Lye Solution(Lye & Distilled Water)
- Colorants
- Fragrance
The first step is to ensure you have enough of the ingredients for your mold. If you purchased the items from the Basic Tools blog you should have the 42oz mold from Amazon. Below is a soapcalc recipe for 42oz, though it provides the percentages for you to adjust this recipe to any size mold.
Fragrance Oil: You will need to check the IFRA chart for any fragrance oil you purchase to ensure you are using the correct amount for that particular fragrance oil. It will be located in Category 9. My suggestion is that if it tells you to use less than 5% do not use that Fragrance Oil(FO). I use 5% in all my recipes but you can, of course, adjust this to your preference but remember that the soap batter can only hold so much fragrance oil. I would not suggest using more than 5%.
Essential Oils: If you'd prefer to use essential oils use this website to determine how much you can use. Not all essential oils can be used on the skin. Also beware that some essential oil smell fades very quickly in soap or will not survive the saponification process. Lavender, Litsea, Peppermint, Spearmint, Rosemary, Cedarwood, and Sage have lasted for me.
Colorants: You can use natural colorants or mica. For natural colorants you can use cocoa powder, activated charcoal, clays, spirulina powder, tumeric powder and more. Some colorants will morph in soap, either turning lighter or darker as they cure. Use 1tsp to 1tbsp depending on how saturated you'd like the color and if you are splitting your soap into sections for more than one color.
- Make your lye solution - ensure to follow the soapcalc recipe and measure in grams, it is more accurate. Allow lye solution to cool to room temp. You can freeze distilled water in an ice cube tray and use half ice cubes and half room temp distilled water to shorten your wait time.
- When your lye solution is around 100 degrees(use a temp gun for accuracy) start to melt your hard butters. You can do this using a double boilers set on low or medium low or you can melt in the microwave in 30 second bursts. Make sure to stir between, if you melt your butters too fast it can cause a gritty texture.
- Once your hard butters are melted add in your liquid oils, stir.
- While you wait for your oils to cool, mix your colorants however you'd like. Most can be mixed using a bit of your oil into a small cup, follow the directions on your mica or natural colorants. This is a good time to ensure your mold is ready for use as well.
- Use a temp gun, when your melted oils are around 90 degrees(this can vary from 76 degrees to 95 degrees) and is within 10 degrees of your lye solution temp combine.
- Use an emulsion blender(one that is ONLY for soaping, not for cooking!) until you come to a light trace. This means the oils and lye solution have combined but are not thick at all. You can check this by lifting the blender out of the batter and seeing if the batter separates.
- Once you are to this stage you can add your fragrance or essential oils and hand stir. If you are doing only one colorants add now and pour into mold. If you are doing two colorants separate batter and add your colors, then pour into container in whatever method you'd like.
- Once your soap batter is in the mold you can texture the top, you can check your soap's consistency by touching the edge slightly with a spoon or wooden chopstick and check how well it will hold texture periodically until it is doing what you'd like it to do.
- Add any botanicals to the top you'd like.
- Spray with 99% isopropyl alcohol to help with preventing soda ash.
- You can cover the top, wrap in a towel or leave it entirely alone. Make sure your mold is somewhere temperature stable and not too hot as the soap will heat up considerably during saponification.
- Wait 18-24 hrs before unmolding. If you add salt or sodium lactate to your lye solution it will help harden your soap faster.