About shaving soap and other experiments

I have recently spent a lot of time knitting, which I love, but don't worry, I haven't forgotten about soaps!
In fact, I believe I'm getting so much better at making soaps, especially since my last two experiments were a great success.

 Firstly, a quick update on the wonderful Fennel Winter Treat. This turned out to be probably the best soap I've made so far; with the sweet smell of organic fennel, as much shea butter as your skin needs during the cold season not to get all chopped and dry, I have been using this soap every day this season, and now I couldn’t do without it! Plus this soap turned out nicely hard and bubbly, so it won't all melt in the shower as some of my previous soaps did. I believe I found the perfect soap, or at least a very good one!

Second of all, I also made another batch of shaving soap, but this time I changed a few things. It's still curing, so I don't know whether it will be as good as the first one I made, but it smells great and with paprika I gave it an interesting orang-y look that I'm very pleased with (the picture doesn't give it justice I'm afraid).

Here it goes:

SHAVING SOAP

Olive Oil                     60%                       600g
Coconut Oil               25%                          250g
Corn Oil                      10%                        100g
Castor Oil                     5%                        50g



Distilled water: 330g
lye: 135g (5% discount)


at trace: 10g of "allume di rocca" (I think in English this is called potassium alum, it's a type of potassium salt that helps healing the small wounds one can get when shaving. You can do without it if you can't find any.);
2 teaspoons of red paprika (don't put too much of it, it might irritate the skin!)
1 tablespoon of white clay
10ml of verbena e.o. (this has a nice mixed citrus smell including orange, lemon, grapefruit and others... men love it!)

Once it's cured, you or your men can use it with a shaving brush just like the old time barbers used to do. My husband and brother use it and love it, because even if it's slightly more complicated to use (it just takes a little practice, that's all) than ready-made shaving foam, it gives a much better result, softer skin and less irritation.

Back with a vengeance

Here I am again, I have been busy moving around, changing jobs and fighting the hot summer these months, so I haven't been able to experiment with my soaps. Also, as I mentioned before, I took up knitting, which is now another if my favourite winter evening activities. I will be posting knitting ideas, links and hopefully patterns soon in here, but for now let's keep it to the soaps.

A couple of months ago, I was finally able to make another batch of soap, since I finally got rid of most of the soap I had accumulated last winter and the weather was finally bearable so that I could take out my lye and oils and start mixing.

What I got is a nice, wonderfully smelling batch of soap full of the beneficial properties of shea butter, but also white and creamy in the lather.

Here's the recipe, as usual feel free to try it but please leave a comment if you do, and also feel free to suggest any changes/improvements!

FENNEL WINTER TREAT

fennel winter treat cp soap

olive oil           70%          650g
coconut oil      15%          200g
butterfat*        10%          121g 
shea butter        5%           50g (at trace!)

*this is common cow's milk butter, with 80% fat so I used 121g to get 100g of fat and the remaining 21g are water so I discounted the amount from the water amount

water 330 g
lye       140g (5% discount)

at trace I added the melted shea butter and 5ml of organic fennel EO plus half a teaspoon of sugar. I was also thinking that a tablespoon of white clay could make the soap harder and slightly esfoliating, but I haven't tried it.

A good idea for hot summer days

Hi everyone,

since the disaster I made HERE worked out pretty well after the rebatching, today I'd like to give you the original recipe, so that you can try it yourself if you wish. I made this one HP, but since there is Aloe Vera so the water is discounted, I would recommend to try it CP, so that you won't get the unpleasant surprise to find your soap solidified on the pot. I would say this is a perfect refreshing recipe for the summer, or for people who practice sport since it also has great antiseptic qualities.

Here we go:

MINTY FRESH

refreshing aloe vera and mint soap bar

20% olive oil                200g

45% grapeseed oil       450g

20% sweet almond oil  200g (of which 20g at trace)

10% coconut oil           100g

5% corn oil                    50g

132g lye (6% discount)

Water 225g

At trace I added: 75g of Aloe Vera (20% of the water amount), 1 tablespoon of green clay (for colouring and for a mild scrubbing effect), 20g of the sweet almond oil, tea tree (20%), eucalyptus (40%) and peppermint (40%) EOs.

Egg yolk shampoo

Hello folks,

in spite of all the negative comments I've read about CP shampoo, as I already discussed I simply love it, so I've been trying to make different recipes to feel the difference and choose which one is best for my hair.

The one I present today is taken from this amazing book, and modified as usual to suit my needs and the ingredients I had at hand. I haven't tried it yet, so I don't know if it's going to be any good (even though I've read many people who use it and love it), but so far it's still curing but it smells wonderful, plus it is becoming nice and hard, so I have high expectations for it. ;)

Here we go:

EGGCELLENT

egg yolk solid shampoo

74,4% olive oil                  372g
13,6% creamed coconut   100g (of which 68g of fats and 32g of water)
7% shea butter                  35g
5% wheatgerm oil             25g (at trace)
67g lye (5% discount)
118g water

at trace I added: one egg yolk mixed well and whisked with the wheat germ oil (I made it into some kind of creamy mixture), lemon, tea tree and rosemary EOs.

It took about 12 hours to become solid, but it needed a little freezer to come out of the mould. It went through gel, and it become kind of greenish after 24 hours, but in a couple of days it turned back to while-yellowish as you can see it in the picture above.

I will keep you posted on the result as soon as I try it.

Feeback on my soaps, finally!

Hello there,

I hope you're good. In these snowy days I've had a few very nice compliments for my soaps, that made me so proud and happy as if I won some kind of prize. :)

I have been giving away some of the shaving soap I made a month or so ago, and all the feedback I got was enthusiastic about how smooth and moisturised it leaves the skin compared to commercial shaving foam or soap, how lovely and creamy its lather is and so on. I had a chance to see it myself, when my husband-to-be tried it: when he shaves, his neck generally becomes cherry-red and takes a good few hours to go back to normal, but the two times he shaved with my handmade shaving soap, he didn't get red at all! Plus his skin felt so soft and relaxed I almost couldn't believe it. My brother and father, who also tried it, gave me the same feedback, so I think I'll make some more of it soon, maybe with some eucalyptus or mint EO to make it a bit refreshing and antiseptic.

Also, I have one of my friends asking me for more soap, since with the commercial soap she used before she said she always had dry skin and had to put on her body and hand loads of lotion to make it better, but since she uses my karité and wheat germ oil soaps she doesn't even need lotion anymore!

I know all you soapers know what these first positive feedbacks feel like... I just canpt wait to make and give away some more soap!!! LOL.

Wish you all a good and hopefully relaxing weekend.

Another shampoo recipe

Hello everyone,

first of all I would like to thank all the lovely people who passed by to read some of this blog, I didn't expect so many of you to read about my soapmaking experiments, so I have been very pleasantly surprised. I hope you like what you read, and that it makes you want to come back and read more. ;)

A part from this, today I've made another batch of shampoo, this time it's egg yolk CP solid shampoo. I took a recipe from a very useful book I own, and changed it for practical reasons (the original recipe includes bees wax, which I don't have, and plus I wanted to customize it a little, which is where most of the fun lies in soapmaking!). I will be posting the recipe and results probably in a few weeks, that is when the shampoo is cured and ready to be tested.

In the meanwhile, I wanted to share with you another shampoo recipe I found  on the same book mentioned above. Once again, I customized the recipe - which came out quite good but a little too soft. Even so, the friend I gave it to, who has pretty greasy and thick hair, loved it, and now wants more, so here's the recipe as I modified it (or you can try the original version from the book if you wish, it might be even better).

NATURAL WONDERBAR

65% olive oil

15% sweet almond oil

9% coconut oil

6% castor oil

3% linseed oil

2% wheatgerm oil (at trace)

lye (5% discount, but fore greasy hair I would recommend even 3%)

water infused with stingy nettles (fresh or dried) and rosemary

at trace I added the wheatgerm oil plus some tea tree and rosemary essential oils, previously mixed with a tablespoon (for 1 kg of basic fats) of rice flour as fixative.

Sorry, I don't have pictures for this one, but as I said it came out quite soft but very cleansing and gentle with the hair. Probably playing around a little with the percentages, or using less water - or again the HP method - maybe you could get a harder, better soap. I am going to try this one again in the future, maybe with less water and see how it comes out.

In the meanwhile, I've given a a birthday present some of my soaps to friends, so I'm really impatient to hear their feedback on it, especially on the beer soap I've very happily made and use myself. Fingers crossed!

Updates on the soap base experiment

I am so proud of the recipe I made up for the soap base to rebatch that I couldn't resist from taking some pictures to show you how it turned out. Probably from only these stupid pictures you can't see how compact and beautiful this soap looks, but believe me it is a pleasure to look at (at least for a soapmaker!), and it bubbles like crazy! The only thing is, it still smells like cheese, but I'm sure the smell will fade away with curing.

So, here it is... (I placed it on a white cloth so that you can see the actual colour it got after gelling)

I am so happy about not only because I made up the recipe myself, but especially because it is made mainly of olive oil and butter (cow's milk butter), which are very cheap and easy to find ingredients around here.

So, if anyone of you want to try it, here's the recipe of my lovely buttermilk soap. Well, before giving you the recipe I have to stress the fact that I did a different calculation at the beginning, but then I realized I didn't have enough butter, but I had already mixed my lye to the water so I had to re-calculate the fats in order to obtain the same lye amount and discount. So the percentages are a bit crazy, and if you ever decide to try it I suggest you use slightly different percentages to make them easier to calculate... but, of course, in any case I can't guarantee any result!

Other thing you have to be very careful about is the butter amount. I know in some countries it is quite difficult to get pure cow's milk butter. What is sold as "butter" is in fact a blend of animal and vegetable fats. In that case, I recommend you not to use it on your soaps, because the SAP calculation would be too difficult, and generally you have no way to know the percentage of each fat in the butter. But if you can actually get a 100% cow's milk butter, then it gets easier. The only thing you have to take into consideration is the percentage of butterfat in it. As an example, I use a 82% butterfat butter, meaning that in each 100g of butter there are 82g of butterfat and 20g of water. I round that 82 to 80, and when I put the recipe through a lye calculator, I am careful to only input the actual amount of butterfat in the butter, and to calculate the remaining water as part of the liquid in my soap. So, as an example, if I want to have 100g of butterfat in my soap, I would add 125g of butter (if my butter is 80% butterfat), and when calculating the water or liquid amount, I would take away the 25g of water in the it, so say I have to add 100g of water, I would only add 75g, because there are already 25g in the butter. 

I hope this is clear.....

Anyway, here's the recipe:


A Cow's Treat (a.k.a. Burrone --> this is its Italian name)

71% olive oil          710g
14% butterfat        (172g of butter, of which 136g butterfat and 36g water)
10% coconut oil    100g
5% castor oil         50g

lye (discount 3%)
water

at trace I added about 90g of fresh cream, and if you want to use it straight away without rebatching I suggest you add some deodorizing EOs like lemon, eucalyptus or mint.

As I said, don't worry if it smells like cheese for the first few days (or maybe even weeks), I've tried soap with butterfat before and, especially if you make it HP, after a few weeks of cure the smell fades away.

I am now sorry I didn't put any EOs in it, because it would have made a wonderful soap in itself, without need for rebatching. Anyway, I will be rebatching soon, and posting the results in here, I'm curious to see if it will maintain this consistency even after the rebatching process.

Basic soap base for re-batching

After the success of the very berry re-batching experiment, I decided to try to make re-batched chamomile, lime-blossom and fennel soap, so that I can use the wonderful herbal teas I have instead of spending a lot of money on EOs. So I decided to make a batch of "neutral" white unscented soap base, and then rebatch it with these herbal teas, and maybe try to colour it as well, or do so swirls. So that's what I did yesterday.

For my soap base I used mainly olive oil (my favourite and one of the cheapest you can find here), with some 14% butterfat and a little coconut and castor oils for lather. I used a very low lye discount (3%) so that I can later add some extra oils while rebatching without getting a oily soap. I made up the recipe myself, so I'm not quite sure of the result. If it comes out well, I'll be posting it here.

I did it CP, and I added some fresh cream at light trace, to see if I get a richer lather and a creamier soap.

EDIT: I have just unmoulded it and I was impressed by how easily it came perfectly out of the mould. I cut it and it looks so good I'm sorry I have to rebatch it!! It looks firm but creamy, a yellowish colour (I suspect it kind of overheated yesterday night while wrapped in my old blanket to gel).
I'll probably be rebatching it before it gets completely cured, maybe in a week or so, so that hopefully it is still quite soft and easy to melt down without all the lumps. We'll see.

My experience with shampoo bars

Hello folks,

today I'd like to share with you my own experience with another "controversial" topic on soapmaking: CP shampoo bars.

Now, I've read a lot on the internet before deciding to make a shampoo bar. Some people say they can't use CP soap as shampoo, others swear they've been using it for a while and they love it, and some other want you to believe that even thinking about CP shampoo is crazy.

I have also read a lot of different opinions on how to properly make it, what lye discount to use and what oils are best for the hair. One common opinion seems to be that olive oil is the best for it's gentle conditioning qualities, and that some coconut and castor oils are a must since a shampoo is expected to make a lot of creamy and frothy bubbles. I suppose there are so many different opinions because, with hair even more so than with skin, the final effect depends not only on the soap itself, but on the type of hair, of weather and of final result we have and want. So I am here to add a bit more to this debate by bringing my own personal experience.

I have always been intrigued by the possibility of making my own shampoo and stop putting all those awful chemicals on my poor, thin, dry hair. So as soon as I came across a shampoo recipe that seemed feasible and logical (I found it on this book, which I strongly recommend to anyone making CP soap because it contains so much useful information!), and didn't even include coconut oil, so I tried it!

The book suggests to use beer for thin and dry hair, because it naturally strengthen the hair and makes it nice and shiny, so here's the beer shampoo recipe I tried (as usual, slightly changed from the one on the book):
 

DRUNKEN MASTER

the drunken master beer shampoo

55% olive oil

15% rice bran oil

10% sweetcorn oil (to add at trace)

10% castor oil

5% linseed oil

lye (7% discount, but this depends on your hair type)

2/3 distilled or rain water and 1/3 "condensed" beer

at trace I added: the sweetcorn oil, rosemary and eucalyptus e.o. and a teaspoon of henna powder (which I've read is another natural conditioner).

As regards the "condensed" beer, that's how I did it: I took about double the amount of beer I needed, put it in a small pot and let it sit for a while to get rid of all the gas it contains. Then I added 1/2 teaspoon of table salt and put it at a low heat for about 10 minutes, or anyway until I could feel it had halved the volume (and it starts getting a little thick). Then I let it cool down and added it to the soap right after the lye and water mixture - or you could add it at trace if you wish.

The result is a pretty soft soap that takes a while to become un-mouldable, and about 6-8 weeks to cure. I used it for the first time a couple of weeks ago, and have been washing my hair with it ever since. I have to say that the feeling with chemical shampoos is very different, and that - as I've read in many different places - since the CP soap pH value is pretty high, it is best to use an acid rinse after the CP soap on hair. So I prepared a bottle with one cup of vinegar and about 3-4 cups of water, plus 3-4 drops of rosemary e.o. that I shake and use  to rinse my hair every time I wash them with my beer shampoo.

The result so far is stunning. I have to say my hair get greasy quite easily now compared to normal (as when I use a lot of conditioner or when I have my hair washed by the hairdresser!), so I have to wash them every 2 days or so, but that's probably because I need a lower lye discount (I'll try with 5% on the next batch), but other that that they feel SO AMAZING!!! They are so shiny and strong, I never had such beautiful hair with any chemical shampoo, ever. My partner even noticed it, and some of my friends too, asked me what I'm doing to my hair that they look so nice and different.

After this first experiment, I think I'll stick to CP shampoo bars, and will try experimenting a bit more with them. I've read of someone who doesn't discount lye at all, and then adds 3% jojoba oil at trace, so that the only "free" oil in the final soap is jojoba, which is really similar to the skin natural oil. I'll try that too, I think.

Other great ingredients for you shampoos could be egg yolks (I've read they are a miracle for thin and weak hair, so I'm gonna try that one too), chamomile (for fair or blonde hair), rosemary (for dark hair), stingy nettle for the scalp and tea tree e.o. for an antiseptic and cleansing shampoo or for dandruff.

I can't wait to try all of these things, and I think I'll get some of my friends to try it too, even though I fear they are too used to chemical shampoos to appreciate the initially weird feel of natural hair. We'll see.

I love milk!

The weather has been pretty bad lately, so I've been staying home a lot... and you all soapahoolics know what that means, right? Of course, soaping soaping soaping! My partner has by now given up complaining about the mess, the soaps everywhere and all the smell, and is actually enjoying my handmade shower soap and shampoo. So that means I have one more reason to experiment more. :)

Today I'd like to show you one of the batches I've made so far that I'm most satisfied and proud of. Even though the colour didn't turn out as it was supposed to, this soap has a wonderful lather and it still smells great and feels great on the skin.

Here we go:

This is a goat's milk and rice bran oil lavender soap. As you can see, I tried to colour it purple (with food colouring), but it turned out some kind of pinky, which layered on the surface and left the rest of the soap green. To tell you the truth, the colour isn't bad and, as I said before, I love the lather and how creamy and nice-smelling this soap turned out. After this, I tried to make other milk soap (mainly with cow's milk which is cheaper and easier to find around here), and I have to say this might become my favourite ingredient! It gives the soap a nicer, creamier look, I believe it might help it to bubble and it seems to be very soft to the skin too (in this specific case probably also thanks to the rice bran oil, which is packed with beneficial vitamins and minerals). In a word, I love it.

Here's the recipe, which I took from some website (I don't remember which one, but you can check out my links list to find many interesting recipes) and changed to suit my personal taste, and most of all the oils and materials I had at hand.

MILKY WAY

40% rice bran oil

35% olive oil

20% coconut oil

5% jojoba oil

lye (discount 5%)

frozen goat's milk

At trace I added: 1/3 the goat's milk (now de-frost and liquid) mixed with some purple food colouring, plus a teaspoon of rice flour (as a fixative of the scent) mixed with about 10 drops of lavender e.o., and finally the jojoba oil.

It took about 24 hours to become solid and come out of the mould, and then I started using it about 4 weeks of curing time.

If you ever try to make it, please come back to share your experience, tips or feedback.