Three Soaps

My student Micky came over last night and we made three new limited edition soaps together. Lavender Essential Oil Shea Butter Soap swirled with ultramarines, a Green Tea Soap swirled with – what else, Green Tea Powder and a Salt Bar.

The Lavender Essential Oil Soap came out as planned, all swirly.

The Green Tea soap had the same kind (ok, I think they were better) of swirls going on it until I:

1. Forgot to put the dividers in my mold
2. Covered it with plastic wrap
3. Dropped the plastic wrap on top of the perfect swirls I had just finished making.

I grabbed my stirrer and did a quick “blind swirl” to fix it. It’s still a swirled soap, but they are just not very precise, which is fine. I learned a couple of things. Green Tea powder goes from a nice green to a dark brown quick in fresh soap. I added some green colorant hoping to get a dark green color out of the swirl, but it wasn’t happening. Which again is ok. It was an experiment and the deep brown color is nice, though everyone thinks these pictures of soap are some kind of dessert.

The Salt Bar

It was my first time making a salt bar. I’ve been seeing these around and curious enough to make a batch of my own. I used 50% Coconut Oil and a combination of Shea Butter, Olive Oil & Castor Oil and I used the same amount of salt as the amount of oils I had in the recipe. Normally I have to wait a few days to unmold cold process soap. Not this one. I unmolded them within an hour and a half. I scented them with a lovely coconut fragrance… and now need to wait for them to finish curing so I can use one for myself! They will be ready to use on June 26th along with the other two soaps I made yesterday. I’ll add the Salt bar picture to this post as soon as I get it photographed. I have some other soaps I want to make, so I’m going to write them down. If you have any special requests, let me know!