Tutorials on soapmaking, bath fizzies, lotions and more
As spring rolls around, you may be looking for some sprightly colorants to liven up your bath & body products. To mimic the color of fresh green grass or newly sprouted flowers, Green Chrome Oxide and Hydrated Chrome Green may be just what you’re looking for. As an added bonus, Green Chrome Oxide is 20% off this month as part of Bramble Berry’s web specials.
Chrome Green (top) and Hydrated Chrome Green (bottom) colorants
As every soaper knows, an intense soaping session requires intense tools, and this silicone tool set is up for the challenge. After years of soaping with lower quality tools that always seemed to break, I created these super durable and easy to clean silicone tools that can withstand temperatures between -40 to 446°F. They’re ideal for cold process or hot process soaping, as well as any other project you can throw at them.
New Year’s Eve may be over, but there’s no reason to put away the sparkling beverages (or fragrances) quite yet. In fact, you may want these two effervescent fragrances on hand all year round! Ginger Ale and Champagne Fragrance Oils are both bright “sparkling” fragrances that enhance almost any other fruity or sweet scent.
With so many folks throughout the country right now in such extreme cold weather conditions, it is important protect your skin and your lips. In any weather, balm protection is key to keeping your lips hydrated and protected to avoid chapping and cracking. So why not have some fun in creating your own balms in your own style and flavors? When making lip products, adding a little (lip safe) scent and flavor can take your balm to the next level. Flavor oils are lip-safe fragrances and ironically, they don’t actually taste. Instead, flavor oils provide your lip products with scent. When using lip products from a store, the flavor you taste is actually a sweetener (commonly a sugar substitute like aspartame) that when combined with the flavor oil, tricks your brain into “tasting” the product.
Bramble Berry carries both sweetened and unsweetened flavor oils. For the unsweetened flavoring oils, Bramble Berry carries bleached stevia and lip smacking sweet flavor oil, which you can use to sweeten balms yourself.
“Mere color, unspoiled by meaning, and unallied with definite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways. ”
― Oscar Wilde
The first thing anyone sees about your soap creation is its color and shape. The thing that will intrigue a customer and get them to pick up a bar of soap is not the scent; it’s the color. From LabColors, to micas, color blocks for melt and pour and pigments, there are many options for coloring your soap. If you prefer to use natural ingredients in your soap, you can still achieve vibrant, beautiful colors using natural colorants. Natural products that impart color include clays as well as herbs and botanicals.
Now that it’s winter time, there’s nothing better than cozying up in your favorite chair with a good book, a hot cup of tea and a richly scented candle with a softly flickering flame (and for me, that only happen during the kiddo’s nap time and I love that quiet time!). Bramble Berry offers a number of excellent waxes so you can make your own candles, and lately our favorite has been the EcoSoya Advanced Wax. It’s 100% vegetable based and sourced from soy beans grown exclusively by domestic farmers. Best of all, it has multiple uses: this wax is lip and skin safe, making it an potential replacement for beeswax in lip balm recipes.
As a quick and easy gift or for a crafty night in, homemade nail polish can’t be beat! I also have it on good authority that nail polish parties are the hot ticket at Otion. We have rigorously tested our Suspending Nail Polish Base to make sure it can suspend all sizes of glitters, and we’ve found the best usage rate is 5 – 7.5% (max) for the glitter. If you add more than that, it won’t matter how lovely and light the glitter is … it’ll still sink. Our nail polish base is also formaldehyde, toluene and DBP free.
Who could have predicted that the same condiment squeeze bottles that hold mustard and ketchup could actually turn out to be indispensable soapmaking tools? We got our 12 oz. Squeeze Bottles in at the beginning of November, and have been soaping up a storm with them.
If you’re a dark chocolate fanatic like I am, you know that it’s almost impossible to avoid it over the holidays (or for that matter, anytime). With our Dark Rich Chocolate Fragrance Oil, you can indulge as much as you want without any of the calories!
This sweet scent is as realistic as they come. In a review of the fragrance, one soaper’s teenage son thought she was actually baking a chocolate cake! Sugary top notes with deep mocha and cocoa bottom notes give this fragrance excellent staying power in cold process soap. Because it’s such a luscious fragrance, it does discolor to a deep ebony brown.
Edit: We asked for it and you delivered! You suggested so many blends with this wonderful fragrance that we’re listing them below. You can read through the original thread on Facebook here.
I love to bake during the holidays, and one of my staple ingredients is cinnamon. Whether it’s cinnamon sugar cookies, cinnamon pinwheel rolls, or cinnamon bread pudding, there is nothing that says ‘holidays!’ to me like the warm, rich scent of this versatile spice (well, that and eggnog…).
Add a touch of sophistication to your Christmas reds by using Merlot Sparkle Mica. Not only does this mica show up brilliantly in melt & pour soap, it holds color exceptionally well in cold process soap.
Shorter days and longer nights don’t have to be a bad thing — hopefully that means more time to spend with family and maybe even more time to soap! If you’re looking for some stunning natural colorants that can be used in both cold process and melt & pour recipes, you will be interested in these new colorants that have been added to the Bramble Berry line: Brazilian Clays. Our Brazilian Clays are versatile, natural, beautiful and non-bleeding.
These clays are naturally colored and do not contain any artificial dyes or pigments. The various shades are actually achieved by variations in the minerals found in the soil in the different regions of Brazil. Bramble Berry carries five different natural clays — Natural Brazilian, Purple, Yellow, Pink and Dark Red.You can buy each color individually, or buy all five at once in our Brazilian Clay Sampler.
The clays are stable in cold process soaps and make a great addition to any clay mask or cream. Clays can be a bit tricky if you haven’t used them before, and you’ll need some additional preparation before using them in your cold-process soaps. Clays are incredibly absorbent and tend to accelerate trace when added dry. They can also cause cracking if they aren’t dispersed first. To prevent this, disperse your clays in distilled water using a mini-mixer. You can use a ratio of 1 teaspoon of clay to 1 tablespoon of water per color. Make sure that the clay is completely saturated with water before mixing or you might end up with a messy cloud of clay.
If you are making melt & pour and want to add any of Bramble Berry’s clays without clumping or settling, we suggest dispersing the clay in a small amount of rubbing alcohol before adding it to your batch. We recommend a dispersion ratio of 2 teaspoons of clay to 1 tablespoon of alcohol. To learn more about natural colorants in melt & pour, check out this blog post.
Below are some fun tutorials that include our Brazilian Clays. If you get a chance to try out the different colors (Natural, Purple, Yellow, Pink, & Dark Red), we’d love for you to leave us a review on the product’s page or share a picture with us on Bramble Berry’s Facebook page. Happy soaping!
Top Left – Clockwise: Cute as a Button, Under Your Spell – Melt and Pour Clay Tutorial, Tiger Stripe “Hanger” Swirl Tutorial, In-The-Pot Swirl & Hot Process Series: Oven Process Layers
Every month we make dozens of batches of cold process soap with various fixed oils, colorants and fragrances. With such array of ingredients to choose from, some tend to get lost in the crowd. Tonight we’d like to showcase an oil that is perhaps the best kept secret in soapmaking — Hemp Seed Oil. This oil can be used in everything from cold process soap to lotions & cremes. It has fabulous skin-loving properties and creates an excellent lather, and it’s a great addition to any soapy creation. This is one oil that will set your products apart from the crowd!
Our Unrefined Hemp Seed Oil (front) is much darker than it’s refined (back) counterpart. Take this into account when formulating your CP recipes!
Bramble Berry carries two different kinds of Hemp Seed Oil: natural (or unrefined) and refined. Both oils work fabulously in cold process recipes. The main difference between the two is the color and the smell. The natural Hemp Seed Oil is more viscous and has a much darker color as well as a distinct, nutty smell. The refined Hemp Oil, on the other hand, is an excellent vehicle for providing essential fatty acids to your skin. Since it’s such a light colored oil, it’s also a good choice if you want to preserve your colors and avoid any unexpected discoloration.
In addition to creating ample suds, Hemp Oil contains high levels of unsaturated fats, which give it great moisturizing properties. We suggest using both types of Hemp Oil in cold process recipes at 20% or less. If you are adding it to a body butter or lotion, you can go as high as 50%. Hemp Oil has a shelf life of about 9 months (longer if frozen), so it’s best to use it soon after purchasing.
Check out the following tutorials to see how we’ve used Hemp Seed Oil:
Whipped Belly Butter (left), Hot Process Oven Process Layers (top) & Cucumber Oak Mantra Swirl (bottom)
As an added bonus, Refined Hemp Seed Oil is 20% off this month! What will you make with your Hemp Seed Oil?
It’s time for another Sunday Night Spotlight, and this week’s ingredient is an all-natural wonder. You can use it in lotions, cremes, soaps and even lip balms. Have you guessed what it might be yet? It’s Beeswax! It is a popular ingredient in natural and handmade bath and body products, and there is no shortage of it in Soap Queen blog tutorials. Read on to learn more about this versatile product.
White Beeswax & Yellow Beeswax
Beeswax has an indefinite shelf life and it’s usually added to bath and body recipes as a hardening agent. The difference between the waxes is slight: Yellow Beeswax is fully refined, while the White Beeswax is naturally bleached by exposing it in thin layers to air, sunlight and moisture. In cold process soap, Beeswax is a natural way to harden your soaps and can be used up to 8% in your recipes. When using it in a recipe, melt it first (make sure not to explode it in your microwave), and add it at thin trace when the batter has reached 140 degrees Fahrenheit or higher (hint: this means you have to mix your lye-water and oils at 140 or above; hotter than most normal recipes). Otherwise, the beeswax will begin to harden in your soap. Be aware that beeswax can contribute to overheating your soap, and you could end up with a soap volcano or heat tunnels if your temperatures are too high. Because of this, I typically don’t insulate beeswax soap or only lightly insulate it for recipes containing 1-3% beeswax.
Everything Balm (using White Beeswax)
Beeswax makes cold process soap harder, but that’s not the case in melt & pour soaps. Adding beeswax to most melt & pour bases will actually make it softer. If you are finding that your particular base is too soft, take a look at your ingredients. If you want a harder base, try our LCP (Like Cold Process) Melt & Pour Bases, which are available in both White and Clear. Alternatively, you can let your soap sit out under a fan for up to a week to get a harder bar of melt and pour soap. If you’re still curious about beeswax and melt & pour, check this post from the beginning days (2007!) of the Soap Queen blog — the recipe didn’t work out as expected, that’s for sure!
Chocolate Lip Balms with Cocoa Powder (using Yellow Beeswax)
You can also use beeswax in your lotions, lip balms, cremes, salves and soaps. Below are some examples of the wide range of products you can create with either yellow or white beeswax.
Tutorials using white beeswax, top left (clockwise):
Coffee Butter Foot Creme, Valentine Cold Process Soap, Lotion Bar Love & Cuticle Salve Recipe
Tutorials using yellow beeswax:
Left (Clockwise): Busy Beeswax Soap Tutorial, Bite Me Not Lotion Bar, Naturally Trimming The Tree & Exfoliating Kisser Scrub
What are you favorite recipes that include Beeswax? Or, have any questions I can answer for you?
