Wax and Bubbles

During the process of making soap you can either make a basic recipe of you can dabble a little into the more luxury butters to add to your recipes. Understanding the different types of butters and the effects they will have on your soap recipes can greatly help you understand what you need to do when re-batching a bad batch of cold process soap also.

For a harder, longer lasting more stable bar of soap you would want to use oils like palm oil, beef tallow and/or lard. You can mix and match the amounts of oils you use or use only one type in you recipes.

For a bar that is full of soft creamy lather the best way to go is coconut oil. Your next runners up would be castor oil and palm kernel oil. Coconut being one of the cheapest of the three oils is what the majority of soap maker’s use while making cold process soap.
Now if you’re looking for a great moisturizing or conditioning soap you have even more choices between olive oil, canola oil, sunflower oil and soybean oil. These oils will create a great moisturizing bar of soap and are also assets to making shampoo bars of soap. Just make sure if you are making shampoo bars you do not use a lot of these oils or the persons hair will come out a tad greasy.

Now lets look at those oils that all we women love to have incorporated into our bars of soap. These oils are all top luxury type oils that will create some of the most intense moisturizing benefits in a bar of soap. The oils you will want to use for this effect will be Cocoa butter, Shea butter, almond oil, hemp oil and jojoba oil. I love a mixture of jojoba oil and Shea butter I have found that these two butter together generate one of the most luxurious bars of soap anyone could ask for.

Cold process (CP) soap is a lot more work than melt and pour soap, but the rewards are greater and you’ll have complete control over the ingredients that go into your batches. Once you’ve mastered the technique, you can experiment with different fats and oils, additives, colours, swirls, and all kinds of neat stuff!

While the actual process of making CP soap isn’t difficult, you have to be extremely careful working with the lye. Always add the lye to cold water; using hot water or adding water to lye can cause a volcano effect that results in contaminated surfaces, skin burns, and a toxic mess. This is obviously something you want to avoid! Wear protective gloves and goggles, and don’t wear your favourite sweater or jeans.

Another important thing to remember is that all of your ingredients will be weighed (except for maybe your fragrance and a few solid additives). You’ll need to invest in a very reliable, electronic kitchen scale that can measure very small weights. If you buy your scale second-hand, test it out to make sure it’s 100% accurate.

Since the basic instructions for making a batch of cold process soap are rather lengthy for a blog post, check out AquaSapone for the best set of instructions I’ve ever found online. Marina covers just about everything, from safety issues to recognizing trace.

If you’re using a tray mold (which I do recommend), you can cut the soap into bars after unmolding it. While you can use this soap right away, it’s best to let it continue to cure for at least four weeks - six if you can stand the wait. As it cures, the soap gets harder and you’ll end up with much more lather than a fresh, soft bar.

Now that we’ve got the basics covered for both M&P and CP soap making, we can start looking at soap recipes! There will be lots of those coming up, so make sure to bookmark this blog and check back regularly. We’ll also discuss making wax candles, gel candles, rolled candles, bath bombs, rebatched soap, hot process soap, and lots more.

cold process soap, soap making, soap making safety, curing soap