Why handmade soap...

Have you ever had to cook something and gotten oils or even shortening on you hands then noticed how soft you're hands felt afterwards? Me too.

That is one of the benefits of handmade soap. Soapmakers build their recipes around moisturizing the skin, cleansing and sometimes exfoliating. Many soap makers go beyond that by decorating their soaps into some beautiful bars. I watch several on YouTube that I admire a great deal, but that's another post for another day.

In order to make soap moisturizing it's necessary to superfat your recipes. If you weren't to superfat every oil/butter molecule in your recipe would saponify into soap with no extras to linger behind for the moisturizing properties we like. I have a Castile For Real bar that isn't superfatted and made with olive oil. It's great for making laundry detergent because there is no extra oils that will get into your clothes. It could also be used for people with extra oily skin.

The percentage of superfatting isn't as tricky as it sounds because so many people have made soap that there are some general rules of thumb. Most soapers start recipes at no less than 5% extra oils and adjust from there. I generally soap at 7-9% depending on the recipe. If you superfat too high, it results in a soft bar of soap that will turn to mush when used.

So handmade soaps are generally more moisturizing to your skin.

Why else is handmade soap great? Depending on the soap maker, there's not extra crud added. Some people add micas and fragrance oils to their soaps, I don't consider them crud. When you do this you can pretty much know what your soap is going to consistently look and smell like. There are some beautiful bars of soap out there!

Other soapmakers stick to natural ingredients, and while everything pretty much comes from nature, some things are altered by humans. Changed chemically, mixed with other things that have little resemblance to what they were in nature, then don't tell you exactly what it is. This.

If I can't make an informed decision on what I'm adding to my soaps, how can I list the ingredients for people who may have allergies?

I don't purchase certain brands of essential oils for this same reason. One of the things that first grabbed my attention here was when I was looking for vanilla essential oil. I don't think it would be financially sound for a company to sell (what they say is) 100% vanilla essential oil for $13 for a 4 ounce bottle. Any reputable company will tell you that it is blended with another oil and tell you what that oil is (in my case it's coconut oil and it will be listed as such in my ingredients).

If I can't tell my customers each ingredient, I wouldn't feel right about putting it in my soap. It's the same with colorant. Micas are beautiful and add gorgeous colors to soap but not knowing exactly what is in the mica, I can't list those ingredients in my soap.

In all honesty I've never heard of anyone having a reaction to micas and most people learn through trial error which fragrance and essential oils they are allergic to. There are a multitude of people who will react in a multitude of ways to a multitude of things so for me, personally,  I'd rather keep things simple.

I hope that doesn't sound like I'm complaining about soapmakers who use these things because I'm not. Just trying to explain why I choose to keep my soaps simple.

The best thing to me about handmade soaps, isn't so much about the things I leave out, but rather, the things I put in. Oils and butters have so many beneficial properties as do essential oils (even though we're not allowed to say that).

I've had people tell me if they have to use store bought soap after using my soap their skin gets dry to the point that it's itchy. I've had others tell me they no longer have dry, scaly skin. And even a few claim that using my soap got rid of rashes that were still there after taking prescriptions. I will never claim my soap fixes or cures anything. I think its possibly a blend of things that's left out of my soap that may be in store bought soaps. Dyes, perfumes, preservatives that maybe their bodies reacted to without them knowing what the exact problem is.

It does my heart good to hear such things though because that's what it's all about for soapmakers. People who find something that feels good on their skin. Something they love and gives them great results.

I highly advise that everyone try handmade soap, even if it isn't mine. Our skin is our largest organ so it's just as important to care for it as it is the insides of our bodies.

Christmas Soaps

A few months ago I started thinking about various soaps to make for my shop that represent the upcoming Holidays. There are still some bars of the Autumn Pumpkin Soap available for now but I wanted some soap for Christmas as well. Making organic/natural soaps can make that a little bit tricky.

It's been difficult to find a natural colorant that makes soap a Christmas red so I passed on that pretty quick. And many of the scents we associate with Christmas (cinnamon,  nutmeg, clove) can only be used in very minute amounts because they are "hot" oils that can be irritating to skin.

I asked for input on Facebook and received some great suggestions!

I ended up with three different soaps, Gingerbread Soap, Eggnog Soap and Christmas Tree Soap. I used the bare minimum of essential oils but like any new skin care item I really...highly...recommend you use these only on your hands and wrists at first to make sure you have no issues with the essential oils. And as always, check the ingredients lists to make sure you have no allergies to anything in the soap.

Gingerbread Soap

The Gingerbread Soap has some pretty awesome moisturizing oil: avocado, castor, coconut, shea butter, etc. It also has a bit of annatto seed oil and cacao powder for color, maca powder and apricot seeds for a bit of exfoliant, ginger essential oil and a bit of ground nutmeg sprinkled on top (didn't think ginger would show up very well). I love the little orange speckles and it smells so good! The bars are a bit shorter but they are also wider. You can see that it went through a partial gel, there's a darker oval that reaches almost to the edges of the soap.

Eggnog Soap

I love Eggnog, so rich and creamy and...noggy. Pretty amazing oils in this soap, too! I added a tiny bit of turmeric to the bottom to give it a creamy color and left the top plain for a bit of whipped cream. It also has nutmeg sprinkled on top, bentonite clay and nutmeg essential oil. It smells amazing!

Christmas Tree Soap

I love the way this soap smells! It has fir needle and cedarwood essential oils and it smells very Christmas tree-like! Spirulina powder was used to add color for this "tiger stripe" swirl. Still getting the hang of those swirls. 

All of my Christmas soaps will be listed in my shop on December 1st and there is a very limited quantity available!

Sweet Erica's Honey, Oats and Goat Soap

I absolutely love this soap. Milk soaps have pretty amazing qualities and have been used for centuries as a luxurious soap. Goats milk soap has a distinctive scent, its a lovely rustic scent that reminds you there's milk in the soap. It's quite lovely and I don't know if it's my imagination but I smell the oatmeal as well!

Milk soaps contain lactic acid which is a gentle exfoliant, it helps remove dead skin cells (who knew!) and goat's milk (and other milks) contains vitamin A which is helpful in moisturizing and maintaining healthy skin.

I love the orange bars of the Sweet Erica's Honey, Oats and Goat Soap but I wanted them to be more representative of the oatmeal color of the very first oatmeal soap I made. Its such a lovely, creamy color and the oatmeal has been blended to a powder so it's not too scratchy. I love seeing the speckles of oatmeal in the bars.

So I went old school with this batch and used the cold process method (it seems to be a bit nicer to do in the summer). I was very fortunate to have my son, Tyler, here to help I definitely needed the extra pair of hands! 

Mixing lye into milk sometimes takes an extra step, it's not always necessary, it's more of an aesthetics thing. To keep the milk from turning a dark orange when adding the lye you can freeze the milk first. Freezing keeps it from overheating (and possibly scorching) when you start adding the lye. Then you add the lye to the milk ice cubes a tablespoon or so at a time and stir...a lot. The frozen milk starts to melt pretty quick and you just keep slowly adding the lye and stirring...a lot...until all the lye has been added and the milk cubes melted. Then you stir...a lot. 

It's interesting to note that the lye and the fats in the goat's milk are already starting to saponify in tiny amounts during this process and tiny beads of soap start forming. The goal with all of the stirring is to make sure all of the lye has been dissolved. I always pour my lye solution through a strainer and the little tiny beads of forming soap made that a bit more difficult than usual but it eventually happened.

Fresh in the mold...love that color!

The soap smells as good as it looks! 

Oatmeal speckles!

When I mixed the lye/milk solution into the oils the lye solution was at 78 and the oils at 85. Nice cool temps for making milk soap. The soap did gel slightly and heat up to 118, surprisingly cool. But when I cut into them...

I had a slight moment of panic. I thought the soap had the...dun dun duuuunnnnn...dreaded orange spots (DOS, and yes...as silly as it sounds, it's a thing). I've heard of it but I've never had a soap with DOS...that I can remember. I did some searching, the pictures of DOS look nothing like this and the reasons behind DOS don't apply to my soaps. So if it's not dreaded orange spots, what is it?

Okay, so here's the story. When I warmed up the oils, honey and shea butter enough to melt the shea the temps were higher than my lye/goats milk solution. I was hoping to get the soap in the mold so I stuck the pot of warm oils in an ice water bath in the sink to bring the temperatures down. If you remember the name of this soap "Sweet Erica's Honey, Oats and Goat Soap...yup, that's honey. When I placed the pot of oils and honey in the ice water bath the honey solidified from the cold. I noticed it towards the end of the pour but forgot about it until I saw the spots. I think in my head (it's crazy in there sometimes) I thought the soap would superheat (milk soaps often do) and the honey would melt/blend with the soap batter as it heated.

So now you'll get the lovely properties of honey directly on your skin and since it's in soap it washes right off. Win-win, right? Well, we'll see. The soap will be perfectly safe to use and unless something crazy happens before it's finished curing, should just be soap with a few bits of honey here and there. It should be listed in my shop in mid-October.

Moral of the story? Wait until the oils and lye solution are emulsified before adding the honey.

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.