alternative liquids Archives

Simple Coffee Soap DIY

July 5, 2017 Filed Under: Bath & Body Tutorials, Cold Process Soap

If you’re a coffee lover, this simple soap recipe is for you. It’s made with coffee seed oil, a dark and rich oil extracted from roasted coffee beans. Coffee seed oil has a delicious aroma. This recipe uses only 3% of it, but that’s enough to give it a light color and coffee scent.

The soap also contains used coffee grounds for exfoliation and coffee butter for extra moisture. Fresh grounds can bleed in soap, which is why used grounds are best. The liquid in this recipe is half distilled water and half brewed coffee. If you have never used coffee as the liquid in your soap before, check out our How to Make Coffee Soap post. Feel free to use all distilled water or all coffee if you prefer.

All these amazing coffee ingredients give the bars enough color and scent without any fragrance oil or colorant. That being said, the scent is very light. If you want a stronger coffee scent, Espresso Fragrance Oil would be great in this recipe. It will lightly discolor the soap.

[Read more…]

How to Make Soap with Wine

March 13, 2017 Filed Under: Bath & Body Tutorials, Cold Process Soap

When I think of wine production, my mind immediately jumps to beautiful images of Napa Valley in California. But, you may be surprised to know that Washington state is the 2nd largest wine producer in the United States. Most of the wine is produced in Eastern Washington, where temperatures are warmer. To highlight this ingredient in my local area, the water in this recipe is swapped for wine produced in Washington state.

Working with wine in soap is not particularly difficult, but it does require some extra prep work. Alcohol and cold process soap don’t mix very well. So, when incorporating alcoholic beverages into recipes (such as beer, wine, etc.) the liquid needs to be boiled first to remove the majority of the alcohol. Then, I like to freeze the liquid and add the sodium hydroxide lye to the frozen liquid to keep temperatures cool.

Alternative liquids like wine have extra sugar, which scorches when mixed with lye. If the temperature of the liquid is kept cool, less scorching occurs. This keeps the liquid a slightly lighter color and reduces the unpleasant odor. Red wine is already quite dark, so if you’d like to skip freezing the wine you could. Keep in mind your soap batter might be slightly darker (and stinkier!). If you skip the freezing step, I do recommend allowing the wine to 50 ° F or cooler before adding the sodium hydroxide lye. Learn more about working with alcoholic beverages in soap here.

The red wine gives the soap batter a dark tan color. Titanium dioxide combats this a bit, creating a creamier color. A combination of Queen’s Purple Mica and Merlot Sparkle Mica create a rich burgundy-wine color. Berrywine Fragrance Oil gives the soap a realistic and slightly fruity scent. Berrywine Fragrance Oil does not smell great out of the bottle, but it smells good in soap – promise!

Using a local wine is a great way to highlight local ingredients and show off your hometown pride!

[Read more…]

How to Use Tea and Coffee in Soap

September 7, 2016 Filed Under: Tips & Tricks

Here in the Pacific Northwest, it’s starting to feel like fall. The leaves are changing, the temperatures are dropping and it’s getting dark earlier. If that wasn’t enough, Starbucks has started serving the ever-popular Pumpkin Spice Latte. There’s something so comforting about hot coffee and a warm blanket this time of year. If you’d like to translate that feeling to soap, check out the tips and tricks for incorporating coffee and tea in different ways into your recipes.

Coffee grounds
Coffee grounds add exfoliation and an interesting look in soap. They are considered a large exfoliant, meaning they will be more scrubby than something fine grained like sugar. Read more about exfoliants here. Coffee grounds are perfect for exfoliating the body, especially dry areas like feet and elbows. Used coffee grounds are best for both melt and pour and cold process soap. Dry grounds can bleed in the soap, creating a halo of color. After making a pot of coffee, place the grounds on a towel and pat dry. A general usage rate is about 1 teaspoon per pound of soap. If you want your soap scrubbier, you can add more from there.

For melt and pour soap, add the used coffee grounds to melted soap and stir well. Keep stirring until the soap is around 125-130 °F. It needs to be thick enough to suspend the coffee grounds evenly. Then, pour into your mold. The Espresso Melt and Pour Soap Bars are made with rich Espresso Fragrance Oil. In cold process soap, add the grounds at trace and whisk gently to combine. It will give your soap a lovely rustic look, as seen in the Espresso Shot Cold Process Tutorial.

Coffee grounds add exfoliation and interest to the Espresso Shot Cold Process Soap.

You can also add tea leaves or ground tea to your melt and pour and cold process soap. They can be added the same way as coffee grounds. That includes incorporating used tea leaves in your batch instead of dry, unused leaves. Make sure to pat them dry before use. Then, add the leaves and stir well. In our tests, we found the tea leaves go brown and tend to bleed in the final bars. Used tea leaves will bleed a bit less. That’s something to keep in mind when designing your soap.

[Read more…]

Kombucha SCOBY Cold Process Soap DIY

April 21, 2016 Filed Under: Bath & Body Tutorials, Cold Process Soap

I’m fascinated by how diet and exercise affects our lives, sleep patterns, energy levels and basically, everything. Because of this, I’m always game to try the newest health food craze. Choffy? Sign me up. Bulletproof coffee? Yep. Probiotics? On it. Recently, I have been on a fermented food kick. This includes eating lots of sauerkraut, kimchi and making my own kombucha. If you’re unfamiliar with kombucha, it is fermented and sweetened tea (usually black tea or green tea). It’s a bit of a polarizing beverage as it has a strong vinegar taste. Personally, I love it as do the kiddos. =)

To create kombucha, a “Symbiotic Colony Of Bacteria and Yeast,” also known as a SCOBY, is placed in the tea to ferment the beverage. As the tea ferments, the SCOBY separates and duplicates. The science is pretty amazing! If you’ve ever made kombucha before, you know how quickly your SCOBY duplicates. Soon, you’ll have more kombucha and SCOBY than you know what to do with. After giving away as much SCOBY to friends and family as I could, I thought (as any soapmaker does), “I need to make soap with this!”

Using kombucha and SCOBY in cold process soap is the same as using other alternative liquids and additives such as purees (click here to learn more about purees in soap). Essentially, the kombucha and SCOBY add sugar to the soap batter, which increases the temperature. I was concerned that replacing 100% of the distilled water in this recipe with kombucha and adding SCOBY would be too much extra sugar. Instead, I chose to puree the SCOBY with a few ounces of kombucha and add the puree at trace.

If you’re curious about how I calculated the water amounts in this recipe with the SCOBY and kombucha, here is how I broke it down:

The full amount of water in this recipe is 18.15 ounces.
First, I calculated a 10% water discount to help it unmold faster. This gave me 16.3 ounces of water (18.15 x 0.9= 16.3).
I’m adding 5 ounces of SCOBY and 3.3 ounces of kombucha at trace. I estimated the SCOBY is about 50% water, which means I’m adding 2.5 ounces of water via the SCOBY.
The total amount of liquid added at trace is 5.8 ounces; 2.5 ounces of liquid in the SCOBY and 3.3 ounces of kombucha. (3.3 + 2.5 = 5.8).
To compensate for the added liquid, I subtracted 5.8 ounces from 16.3 ounces to get 10.5 ounces.

To go from 18.15 ounces of water to 10.5 ounces of water looks like a huge water discount. But, keep in mind you are adding 3.3 ounces of kombucha at trace and 5 ounces of SCOBY at trace, which has a large amount of water (approx. 2.5 ounces). Technically, you can safely mix lye and water at a 1:2 ratio. To read more about water discounting your soap, click here.

I did experience some heat-related issues in this batch. You can read about them at the bottom of this post. Keep in mind the sugar and water content in my kombucha might be a little bit different than yours because each brew will be unique. Because kombucha naturally contains vinegar, I was curious how this would affect the pH of my bars. I tested the pH of these bars and it was 8, which is on the lower side of normal for CP soap. This may vary depending on how “strong” your kombucha is. Click here to read more about the pH of cold process soap.

[Read more…]