My hair and my shampoo

Hi all,

this post is just to show you what I've been trying to demonstrate in the past posts. Here's a picture I took right after washing my hair with one of my solid CP shampoo bars, rinsing it with vinegar and leaving it to dry naturally without hair-dryer:

my hair washed with handmade CP shampoo

looking good?

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.

A failed batch... and how I (hopefully) saved it.

Oh, well, a failed batch happens every now and then, it's part of the game and when it does, I always try to think positively about all the things I can learn from it instead of complaining or getting sad.

This time, I tried to make an Aloe Vera refreshing soap, scented with mint and eucalyptus. I wanted to make it HP, so that the strong, fresh scent of mint could stay almost intact in the final soap. WRONG! The problem is, with Aloe Vera you have to count it as part of your water, so you kind of have to discount water from the lye solution, in order to make up for the water in the Aloe juice, which is what I did. I also used a high percentage of unsaturated fats to make the soap softer and justify the absence of part of the water (20% to be precise). Well, it didn't work. I made my soap and brought it to trace as usual, then stuck it in the oven at 50°C for 20 mins, as usual. I took it out to stir a little, and it looked awesome, so I switched off the oven and put the soap back in for another 20 mins... but when I took it out again it was very solid, extremely difficult to mix with the remaining ingredients and way too hard to pour it into a mould!!! DISASTER!!!

In a panic attack, I decided to try to incorporate the EOs and aloe juice anyway, hoping that, mixing like crazy, I could have made it into a fairly homogeneous mix... and I thought I kind of did it, but when I tried to unmould the thing, I was horrified to be presented with this ugliness:

failed batch of HP soap

I didn't know exactly what to do with it, it smelled so good I didn't want to just throw it away, so I decided, after careful consideration, to keep a couple of pieces as samples, and to rebatch the whole thing immediately, to see if the soap would mix a little better. So I cut it into small chunks and put it on a very low heat in my soap pot:

rebatching failed HP soap

I added 1/2 cup of aloe juice and heated it up until melted (it only took a few minutes. Then I added again a few drops of EOs, just in case some evaporated in the heating process. I poured it into a mould and let it cool down, then as usual I froze it for about un hour, took it out, unmoulded and cut, and what I got now is this:

rebatched and saved aloe soap!

It's now very soft because of the extra Aloe jiuce, and as you can see, it's not completely smooth, but I'm hoping it's at least usable. I have to say it smells great, so I'm really hoping it turns out something nice for the hot summer days. I'll keep you posted on this one.

Fragrance oils or essential oils?

This is the big dilemma that many soapmakers have to face when starting to make soap. Go for the cheap, inexhaustible synthetic fragrance oils (FOs), which can have any smell you like and cost 1/2 or even 1/10 of their natural counterpart, or stick to the more natural but sometimes unbelievably costly essential oils (EOs)?

I have to say I haven't found an answer to the riddle. Pros of EOs are, of course, their very natural and delicious smells, the beneficial proprieties they carry (which are the proprieties of the plants they are extracted from), that can be passed on to the soap, as well as the fact that they make a all around, 100% natural soap. Cons are of course the difficulty to find some rare, expensive scents, the sometimes unbelievably high price and the the fact that you surely have less choice compared to FOs.

On the other hand, pros of FOs are the opposite: you have a potentially infinite choice of smells and blends, you can find anything you want, from green apple to black pepper, and they all have the same, generally low price. But on the other hand, sometimes there could be incompatibilities with the skin, since many of these FOs aren't made for the skin. Plus some of them could make the soap seize in the pot, and what's most important they don't give to soap that nice, natural smell that only EOs can have. Plus they don't carry any property, and they make your soap a little less natural.

Of course, I would rather use 100% only EOs, but since I'm no billionaire, and soapmaking for me is just a hobby and not a business, so far I've stuck to a simple rule: I use EOs for the fragrances that are cheap enough not to make me want to cry when I buy them (these include lavender, eucalyptus, lemon, tea tree, rosemary, ylang-ylang, sage, pine, mint etc.), and FOs for the rest, especially for sweet or flowery smells, whose EOs can cost up to 30-40€ for 10ml!! So I've made soaps that smell like vanilla, rose or jasmine, which unfortunately all contain FOs. Plus I've decided I'll keep looking on the internet until I find a good, inexpensive EOs retailer where to buy my EOs... and if I do find it, maybe I'll be able to stick to EOs only.

In the meanwhile, the refreshing Aloe Vera, eucalyptus and mint soap I'm making is almost ready, so I'd better go and check on it!

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!

Rebatching disaster!

My goodness, the batch of white base I made last week was so awesome I was sorry I had to rebatch it... but now I'm even more sorry! 

The rebatching I did so for did not turn out very well, unfortunately. I tried with some herbal teas to see if the final soap had at least vaguely the smell of the tea (this worked with a red berries tea I tried some time ago!!), but nothing. This time I tried with chamomile tea and with fennel tea. The soap I rebatched with fennel smells very vaguely like it, but the chamomile nothing at all. :(

Plus the soaps are so very soft, I don't know how long it'll take them to become hard enough to be usable. Actually, they look ok, but they don't smell at all and are way too soft. I used different water amounts for both. On one I used half the aount of soap in water, and on the other I used the same amount. The first batch did not melt very well and turned out a bit lumpy, that's why I tried the 1:1 proportion. That was good for the melting, the soap melted nicely and became smooth and easy to be poured in the moulds, but as I just said both batches turned out a little too soft, I suppose. I'll give it a few weeks and see.

Next time I'll try to infuse the basic oils, and see the result, even though I've read that it doesn't keep the smell for long. I will also be trying (probably today or tomorrow) a kiwi fruit rebatching that I found on a book. The author of the book doesn't add any colouring or FOs to it, so I'm guessing the kiwi will leave a pleasant smell and colour to it. I know this will mean a shorter shelf life for the soap, but just for trying I'll do this with a very small amount of soap, something like 100g or so.

I guess I still have to learn a lot about rebatching...