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.