Colored Lip Balm

I have just bought new jars for balm and am excited to use them.  Last time I did the balm, it had quite strong coffee smells, I like it, but some mentioned that they ddin't.  So might as well try a new formula.  This one has less coffee butter, so no coffee smell and the color is much lighter.  

Since I have some rose essential oil and found out it is lip safe so here is the balm.  Added some mica to get this shade of rose.

So this is how it turns out.

Quite like the color, but would love to find out, how to make other shade as well.

Coffee Butter Lip Balm

It's been a while since I last updated the blog.  Last two months were chaotic.  Now things are slowly getting back to normal.

Last year, I made lip balm as a New Year gift, and it was quite a success.  So this year I would like to make some more but I didn't have any flavor oil.  I have coffee butter, and it smells wonderfully strong, and also read that it does come through in lotion and lip balm creations.  So I decided to give it a go.

Here is the recipe:

Carnuaba Wax    2.5 g
Beeswax             4.5 g
Coffee Butter         9 g
Cocoa Butter         6 g
Castor Oil         12.5 g
Jojoba Oil           3.5 g
Squalane             3.5 g
Wheat Germ          8 g
Vitamin E            0.5 g

1.  Melt oil & butter together in a microwave or over double boiler.
2.  Remove from heat, add vitamin E.  Pour into mold.

This balm was tinted with dark chocolate to give it a bit of color, the chocolate smell did not come through, only coffee did.  Some use a bit of lipstick to add color.

This recipe is not fixed, you can play around with it, but the balm may have different feels to it depending on the oils & butters.  I use lots of oils because I have many oils that I want to try, but if you don't have any of these, just substitute the liquid oils with oils that you have on hand, e.g. olive oil, rice bran oil, coconut oil.

I just got some nice lip balm jars, so will be making colored lip balm just to see how pretty it will look.

Peppermint Soap

I love the smell of peppermint.  At present I have two peppermint oils from two sources and they smell so different.  One has a sharper note and the other one is more mellow.

When I think of mint, I usually think of green and so another green soap.  This soap was inspired by a very charming soap, but this turned out so different from what I had aimed for.  Well, keep trying and I will definitely get it right some day.

I love using chlorophyll color for green.  Lesson learned, you need quite a fair bit to make it green, this one is very soft.

Used mica on top for the swirl effect, nice green but does very different.

Thank you for reading.

Rebatching Soap - Crock Pot vs. Double Boiler

There are a few ways to rebatch.  Here are a couple; double boiler and crock pot

The first batch consisted of 2 failed batches of soap, the first one I left it on cure rack for 2 weeks and the second batch was quite new.  I grated the soap together but separated the white and pink, then put it in the double boiler over gentle heat.  It took nearly an hour and a half to dissolve.  Then I mixed the two parts up, perhaps too much, because the colors just blended together.  The texture looks acceptable considering I used 33% lye solution with no extra water when rebatching.

In the second batch was a new soap fresh out of the mold.  I planned for orange and yellow soap, but the colors disappeared, so another rebatching opportunity.  And since I wanted to know if there is any difference in  the texture of soap using crock pot to the one done in the double boiler, I decided to give it a try.  The crock pot had higher heat than the double boiler.  Soap did stick to the side of the pot a bit more.  However, it used less time, only about an hour.

I added more color at the end of the cook, since there was little color to begin with, but still not much showed up.  Perhaps I needed more orange.  This is the result:

Personally I prefer the texture of the soap from the double boiler.  How about you?  Which is your preference?  Would really love to hear what you think of these two methods or if there are any differences.  O was it just me?

Vanilla Cream Soap

Here we sometimes use lard for cooking, but after hearing so much praise about it in soap, I decided to give it a try.

Here is the recipe for this particular batch, hope it will be gentle with plenty of bubbles as lard is said to give big bubbles.

Olive Oil             35 %
Lard                   40 %
Coconut Oil        10 %
Cocoa Butter      15 %

It's said that lard takes a long time to trace, and since this batch contained both olive and lard, I decided to go for the extreme 42% discounted water.  Even with this steep discount, it took quite a while to trace.

I was not going to color this as I know the F.O. will discolor, so I added whipped cream, honey and colloidal oat at trace.  Also made some textured top to add some excitement to a rather plain looking soap and a little gold mica for fun.

This is how it looked when it went into mold.

I have left this batch to cure for a month now, the soap discolored beautifully and it smells so good.

Now all I have to do is wait a couple more months before I can try this.

If you are interested in DWCP, here is a link to one http://southernsoapers.com/news/soapmaking-tutorials/discounted-water-cold-process-soap-methods/.

Thank you for reading.

Swirl in the Mold Part 2

After a few days, I had finally managed to get the soap out of the mold.  I had to put the mold in the freezer for a several hours and then let them thawed, before they would release from the mold.

I did some drawing to go with the how to in the previous post and hope this will make it easier to follow.

1.  Pour the soap in thin line over the base, diagonally all across the mold.  Try not to over the colors.

2.  Then use chopstick to make the swirl by dragging it across the soap, make sure that it goes all the way to the bottom.

Thank you for reading.

Swirl in the Mold Part 1

This is the most basic of all the swirls on soap.  It is likely the first attempt a new soaper would try to do, I tried this method first, too.  It is quite easy to achieve a good outcome as you can see what the result will look like.  As with other swirl in the mold methods, this is done at light trace.

All you have to do is to divide the base soap into 3 parts; 2 parts will be used as base, and another part to be  mixed with the colors for the swirl.  In this batch, I misjudged the soap and ended with 2 parts only, so the swirl pattern was quite heavy.  The main batch was left white, while the rest was divided into three parts to be mixed to make - blue, black, and purple soap.

1. Pour all the base into the mold. 
2. Then pour a line of colored soap onto this.  I did a diagonal pattern all across the soap, one color at a time and tried not to overlap them.  And since I had too much colored soap, I repeated the process in the opposite direction.  
3. Then drag a chopstick through the soap, once horizontally, once vertically and and once more diagonally.  

This is how it ends up.

Enjoy soaping!

(Some drawings in Part 2)