Day 1 – Handmade Lotion Soap
Full instructions for making melt and pour soap are here and here.
10% Handmade Lotion soap
Resulting (yellow) soap is very light, fluffy and floats in water.
Day 2 – Sweet Almond Oil Soap
10% Sweet Almond Oil soap
1 drop Fuchsia Labcolor
25% Sweet Almond Oil Soap
Day 3 – Store-Bought Lotion Soap
10% Store-Bought Lotion soap
25% Store-Bought Lotion Soap
Full instructions for making melt and pour soap are here and here.
Conclusions:
None of the recipes lather very well. This is because the extra oil (from the lotion or the Sweet Almond Oil) is weighing down the bubbles. This causes an oil slick which is moisturizing for your skin.
The recipes with the handmade lotion both float. This is exciting. The resulting bars are light, fluffy and marshmallow like. If you were retailing these bars, you would be selling 25% air. That will help your margins dramatically.
Our favorite recipe is the one with the 25% handmade lotion. It is lighter, and fluffier than the purple (Day 3 Store Bought Lotion) bar and leaves the skin supple and soft.
Good names for these bars would be: Shaving Soap, Cleansing Bar, Nourishing Clean, No Bubbles Bar … Post if you have any other ideas!
The premium I would charge for these bars (extra labor, extra ingredients, more education for the public) would be 25%, or $1-$1.50 extra per bar.
I hope you enjoyed this week’s project. Many thanks to Nicole in Customer Service at BB for her help on this project!
Hi Sara –
The soap recipe that I give in the blog is a bit hard to scoop out of jars – but with a higher lotion percentage, you could easily scoop it out of a jar.
I really enjoyed reading this! I have a question about the soap in the jars – is that able to be scooped out easily or does it set up too hard..? I would love to make that! Sorry for this comment being anonymous, I don’t have an account, just found this from the wonderful Bramble Berry site! Thanks for any clarification! -Sara
Peggy from Canada emailed me with some extra information to add:
I checked-out the m&p version of cream soap on the blog and was surprised not to find any postings re:
using rebatching soap to make cream soap. For the full skinny on how to, see Gill Farrer-Halls “Natural Beauty Recipe Book” Quarry Books, 2006. Chapter
11 has lots of recipes for stuff you can do with rebatching soap base.
Rose, that sounds like a delightful accident! I would love to try that one day soon.
I ‘accidently’ made some lotion soap while making lotion and mistakenly put liquid soap into the recipe instead of the jojoba oil that I use! It was beautiful; light, fluffy and marshmallowy. I added the usual jojoba oil and it is so creamy and nice. It doesn’t foam much, but who cares when it feels as nice as it does!
I love that you guys are experimenting with other ways to make floating or cream soap!
Carrie Gigi, I’m not surprised the soap eventually hardened up. I am continually amazed at how much abuse (additives, extra oils) soap takes and STILL hardens up to something bar-like.
Anne-Marie
Oh, hey, Carrie! I just emailed you about my new blog (The Soap Bar Blog) – I hope you consider it!
Best- Joanna
I love the idea of the soap being so whipped that when it “hardens”, it feels like a marshmallow. I want that so badly, so I need to figure out how to do marshmallow bath drops. Hmm. More experiments in the concoction laboratory…..:) Thanks, Carrie!
Joanna~ I have done just that (CP in place of M & P). Put it this way, it didn’t turn out the way I wanted it to. Here’s what I did: I slow melted some CP shavings, added some almond oil. As it “slowed cooked” I thought-this just might work because it looked so creamy. It easily poured it into bottles, but ended up becoming very hard over night.In order for me to use this “soap experiment” I have to warm up the bottles~ For now, my recipe is a long way off from sharing with others!
HAve you tried this with cold process soap in place of the M&P? DO you think it would work the same?