Spiced Apple Cider Soap

Let me just start by saying that I freaking LOVE the holidays. Ever since I was a wee laddy I've always found something magical about Autumn. It's my favorite season, and always has been. I love when the leaves start to fall and the wind has that first bit of bite to it. The trees where I grew up in Texas mainly went from green directly to doodoo brown, but the season was and still is the most fun for me.

So, since I love Fall and the holiday season, and I also really enjoy soaping, my big idea this year is to send out some of my soaps to friends and family for the holidays. I know - groundbreaking, right? I got some holiday scent fragrance oils in the mail this week from Brambleberry soap supplies and had to try one out immediately, being the dork that I am.

For those non-soapmakers (which is basically like, well um, most people), Brambleberry is the Amazon.com of soap making. They're basically the one stop shop for anything soap related. They've got essential oils, herbs, molds, colors... you name it, they've got it. I picked out a few fragrance oils for this year. Pumpkin Spice (they didn't have a pumpkin pie scent, boohiss, but this one is kinda close), Woodland Elves (basically just a dorky fun name for evergreen scent), Applejack Peel and Spiced Apple Cider. After a quick facebook poll to make up my mind, I whipped up a batch of the spiced apple cider. Like most of my soaps, these are 100% coconut oil.

Concerning scents in the soap making world, there are generally two schools of thought (though there's a lot of overlap with individual soap makers). In one corner we have the essential oils. These are oils distilled directly from various herbs. Lemongrass, lavender, tea trea, eucalyptus and orange are examples of really popular essential oils. They've been around for hundreds, sometimes thousands of years, and are really fun to use but can be a bit pricey. I prefer essential oils because they're all natural and in many cases therapeutic, but one of the drawbacks is it's difficult to mix them to create a specific smell like pumpkin pie, for example.

In the other corner we have fragrance oils. These are synthetic oils that reproduce an enormous variety of scents. There are literally hundreds, perhaps thousands of these suckers. You can get anything from Christmas Tree to Mango Pinapple Salsa to Shoe Leather. Seriously, I think I saw a shoe leather one once. Anyways, these are great for specific scents but they are lab made, which means people with allergies to synthetics (or extremely sensitive skin) might find these undesirable. A plus, however, is that you can use a lot less of a fragrance oil to get your desired scent. With essential oils you sometimes have to load the soap up quite heavily with them.

There are some soap makers who exclusively prefer one school or another, but from what I've seen so far most soap makers use both. In general I fall under the essential oil category, but I have no clue how to make specific holiday scents with those so voila - I bought me some FO's (short for fragrance oils).

I added some merlot, orange, and silver mineral pigments to the moisturizing oil for color. I was aiming for a warm merlot brown, and I basically got that, but not as dark as I would have liked. It's kind of a warm wine color, even though it looks pink in the picture (I really need to stop using my cell phone camera and get some better lighting in the near future).

This batch went well, but since my apartment isn't huge, and FO's are strong, I got a bit of a headache while making it. Complete apple cider overload. The soaps came out smelling great, but I had to air my apartment out a bit before I could stand being in it for very long. All in all the finished soaps look and smell nice, I think.

Lavender Infused Coconut Soap

A few weeks ago I bought some fresh lavender from Trader Joe's, which, if you aren't on the west coast, is like Whole Foods but for the more, um, value-oriented hipster. It's the place you go when you want granola, but you don't want to give up a kidney for it. I love that place. Anywho, I put the lavender away when I got home and forgot about it for several weeks. Until yesterday. I was looking around and voila, found that my fresh lavender had turned into dried lavender. The buds had dehydrated really nicely (gotta love that dry Los Angeles air), so what else was there to do but make soap with them?

Lavender is always a big hit with people. It's a popular essential oil with a very long and rich history, going back at least 2,500 years. Its name is derived from (duh) the purple color of its tiny flowers, and it was used as a perfume by ancient Egyptians and cure-all by the Greeks. Today lavender is used for relaxation, stress reduction, and even to help in the healing of bruises and burns. No lie, if you're starting to bruise, or you burn yourself, apply a few drops of lavender essential oil and you can really tell the difference.

I've used lavender in my massage therapy practice for years, and there's really nothing quite like it for that "ahhhh" relaxation feeling. I can remember finding the smell a bit too flowery at first, but now it's one of my favorite scents. I've played around with using lavender in previous batches of soaps, but I decided to go all-out with this one, and base the soap around the herb rather than just doing my thang and adding in some lavender essential oil at the end.

I spent a few hours steeping the herb in the melted oil for this batch. This makes a sort of tea, so you've got lavender oil rather than just plain oil. You're really supposed to let it steep in a jar by a sunny window for a few weeks if you want to make true infused oil, but I am notoriously impatient so I cooked mine for a couple of hours in the crockpot. The oil was pretty fragrant after I strained it, so I sort of accomplished my goal, I think. The next time around I want to prepare a true infusion just to see how it differs.

There are lots of lavender essential oils out there, but the one I added after the soap cook is actually a popular blend of different lavender essential oils. The point being, since crops differ each year and all the oils differ slightly, to make a lavender essential oil that is consistent in quality and scent year after year. I find the oil I use isn't as herby as a lot of other lavender EO's (what soapers called essential oils), and is a bit more subtle, but I really like how it smells.

This batch actually wasn't without its hiccups. Because the oil was so hot from steeping the lavender flowers, when the chemical reaction with the oil began it kind of rose up and out of the crockpot, onto my stove and my floor. But, I was able to salvage most of the batch (not the soap that hit the stove and floor, of course) and have it not end up a complete disaster.

I mixed in some moisturizing oils, the lavender essential oil, and some dried lavender buds along with a bit of silver mineral coloring to give the pale soap a kind of sheen. The finished product turned out pretty well, I think, and the smell is absolutely awesome. Essential oils are notorious for fading after a while, but that's part of the art of making this stuff. Experimenting and finding what works and will stick, and what doesn't work so well. It'll be fun to see how the soap changes in a few weeks as it dries out and hardens up a bit (what soapers call "curing"). All lye based soaps are better after a few weeks of curing.

But that's a whole other entry.

First post ever! Coconut Cocoa Butter Soap

Hey there,

This is my foray into the blogging world. I'm hoping to document my progress as a soaper while creating an easy way to keep all my friends and family informed of what I'm up to.

I've been at the soap making game for about five weeks now, following a few weeks of obsessively researching online and in soaping books. I'm kind of embarrassed about starting a blog, honestly. I don't feel like I'm experienced or skilled enough yet to really start showing off what I'm making, but after hours and hours of combing soap making forums the creation of a blog seemed to be a pretty popular theme.

Soap is basically oil which has reacted with a mixture of lye and water. Lye is a chemical found in wood ash, and it's an extremely potent base. When combined with water it creates a powerful chemical reaction (the water actually approaches boiling temps in a matter of seconds), and once cooled, this solution is combined with your oils to create soap.

I've been making soaps exclusively by the Hot Process method. With this method, you actually cook the soap to speed up the conversion of oil into soap. If all goes well, by the end of the process you have usable soap without having to wait two to three weeks for the lye to finish reacting with the oils. It happens in the pot.

Also, with this method, the additives you put into the soap (higher quality oils for moisturizing, essential oils for aroma and therapeutic value, etc) are untouched by the powerful chemical reaction going on with the lye. Meaning you get more of the additives' beneficial properties in your finished soap. This is one reason I prefer HP over CP (Cold Process).

The downside, of course, is that HP soap has a rougher look to it than CP soap, because it's usually the consistency of mashed potatoes when you glop it into the mold. With CP soap, the soap is much more fluid when you pour into molds, so your finished product has a cleaner look. This doesn't bother me too much, though it does for some.

So, yea. My preferred soaping oil is coconut oil. In my first few weeks I experimented with coconut oil and a few other oils mixed together (olive oil, grapeseed oil, castor oil etc), but I found I really liked the finished coconut soaps the best. They lather extremely well and are very cleansing. It also makes a very hard bar of soap, because coconut oil is high in saturated fats. When oils with high saturated fat content react with lye, they make a harder bar of soap than oils low in saturated fats (such as olive oil). They also have a much higher cleansing factor, so you have to be careful to add enough extra oil at the end of the cook to provide some moisturizing properties.

The soap I made and cut today is a 100% coconut oil base, with cocoa butter added as a moisturizing oil after the cooking process. I went with about 20% raw cocoa butter in the finished soap, and the smell is great. It smells like a nice bar of dark chocolate. Yum. :) I also added about a teaspoon of bronze mica to the soap to give it some color. I wasn't going for pink, exactly, but it turned out to be a pretty nice color. Not sure how well it goes with the whole cocoa butter concept, though.

Hope you like it.