Gma's Jittery Mocha Latte soap...

I started making this soap because so many people love coffee and coffee has great benefits for the skin. The first batch I made had coffee as part of the water in the lye solution and coffee grounds as an exfoliant.

Current Gma's Jittery Mocha Latte soap...

It is a pretty great soap with castor, coconut, grapeseed, olive, sweet almond and avocado oils, as well as cocoa butter. It also has yogurt and heavy whipping cream. I really wanted this soap to smell like coffee and I have searched for a roasted coffee essential oil for months.

During that search I started reading about the benefits of coffee bean oil (not essential oil) and there are a lot of them. I'm one of those people who kind of take miracle cures/fixes with a grain of salt even though I've had tremendous luck with essential oils for so many different things.

Some of the claims that coffee bean oil proponents promote include...

• Reduces acne
• Diminishes cellulite
• Soothes insect bites/stings
• Soothes puffy eyes
• Acts as an antioxidant and fights free radicals 
• Reduces fine lines/wrinkles

I definitely felt like it was worth the investment to add this to Gma's Jittery Mocha Latte Soap. To make recipes for soap I use a soap calculator (SoapCalc) that lets you...well, calculate soap ingredients. Most importantly, it calculates the safe amount of lye to use in your batch.

When I want to see the properties of a specific oil, I just add that one oil to get an idea of what it does for soap on it's own. So here are the results of coffee bean oil...

I mainly pay attention to the top 5 "Soap Bar Quality" numbers and I can see that coffee bean oil adds hardness to the bar, is conditioning and provides a creamy, rather than bubbly, lather. So it seems like a good addition to soap because SoapCalc is going by the oils properties (fatty acid chains and stuff), not by what the internet says about coffee bean oil. You can see that it has no cleansing properties in and of itself, however if you're using it to wash your hands your hands will still get clean...because you're washing them. In comparison, check out what happens if a bit of coconut oil is added...

It becomes a much harder bar, it has great cleansing qualities and now it has some bubbles. But, the conditioning and creamy qualities go down. Ahhhhhhh! I can spend hours working on recipes to get the best possible properties I can. So why does this happen? No idea. Obviously coconut oil has different fatty acid chains and they may react to water molecules in a whole 'nuther way.

Anyway, what was I talking about? Coffee soap! So I made more Gma's Jittery Mocha Latte Soap yesterday and added roasted coffee bean oil and coffee essential (I wasn't sure if the coffee bean oil scent would stay through the curing process). I just have to say that both of these smelled amazing! I was pretty excited about making a coffee soap that smells like coffee.

So the batch was mixed and I split a tiny bit of the batter off. To the larger portion I added organic cacao powder...it is a mocha latte, afterall. I left the smaller portion as it was and poured...

Textured the top with a spoon and sprinkled ground organic coffee and organic cane sugar on top.

Now I just clean the kitchen and start waiting to see if it gels...

The soap did gel, the hottest temperature reading was 114 degrees F.

And this morning it was ready to slice...

You can see the lighter drop swirl at the top of the bars.

This soap should darken a bit, at least the part with the cacao powder, it's a bit hard to see but there is a darker rim around the sides and bottom of the soap. This "discoloration" is part of the curing process. I was a little perplexed by the fact that the coffee grounds look like they're encased in air bubbles, I try pretty hard to eliminate air bubbles in the soap before and after the pour.

The biggest issue I have at the moment is that...I smell very little coffee. I didn't necessarily want it to be a hit-you-in-the-face coffee scent but I didn't want it to be a I-think-I-smell-coffee-but-it-might-be-my-imagination scent either. I'm hoping when the "new soap smell" wears off, the coffee scent will shine through. If not, at least it will have real coffee, coffee grounds and coffee bean oil. That's about as coffee as I can make it and it will be listed in my shop at the end of October.

If you can't wait until then to grab a bar of Gma's Jittery Mocha Latte Soap, there are a few bars of the original version left in the shop.

Handmade Soaps

Have you ever taken the time to learn how to do something that interests you, spent hours (days, weeks, months) studying it, preparing for it and then finally getting to make it just to have people point out that you could buy that something at the store? Mmmhmmm, yeah.

Stores carry all kinds of bath products, some are even natural, but I haven’t found any that are as lovely as handmade soap.

Learning about the natural oils and butters that go into handmade soap has been a trip! Some oils create more lather, some create more bubbles, some make a harder bar of soap, some make a softer bar of soap. Some are moisturizing, some drying if you use too much. Some oils are better as cleansers. I find it all very interesting and trying to put the right oils together in the proper amounts to get a bubbly, lathery, cleansing, moisturizing bar of soap is fun for me.

Then there are essential oils. Some are great in handmade soaps, some just disappear quickly. There are a multitude of reasons to use essential oils from their antibacterial properties to their scent. I don’t feel as if every bar of soap needs a scent, they can interfere with perfumes and colognes, and they can also be an issue for people with sensitive skin.

Amanda Bavender Lavender Soap, grapeseed oil infused with alkanet root used as the colorant.

Natural colorants like the alkanet root used in the Amanda Bavender Lavender Soap can be a challenge. Some behave just like you hope, they add the color you want to the soap you’re making and they look lovely. Other’s lose their color or completely change into a color you’re not expecting. As much as I want my soap to be beautiful, a bar’s moisturizing properties are my ultimate goal. Pretty soaps aren’t useful if they aren’t good for your skin. And there are tons of pretty soaps out there that are moisturizing as well. For the soaps I make, and use, I want to stick to natural colorants.

There are also other ingredients to consider such as activated charcoal, clays and exfoliants. I try to fit the ingredients to the purpose of the soap.

All of these things together are what makes soap making so interesting to me. They are the reasons I like making soap. I also like making soap for health reasons. Our skin is our largest organ and I think it’s just as important to be watchful of what we put on our bodies as what we put in our bodies. I try to use as many non-GMO and/or organic ingredients as possible.

Hopefully, as I learn more about the many aspects of soap making, I can share them here. Other times I may just write about random things, like the weather. Either way, welcome to my blog.