tea soap Archives - Soap Queen

Black Tea Soap Tutorial

July 14, 2017 Filed Under: Bath & Body Tutorials, Cold Process Soap

Black tea has been renowned for centuries as a potent source of powerful antioxidants. This Black Tea Cold Process Soap recipe harnesses those properties by replacing water with black tea. It’s also scented with the new Bergamot Black Tea Fragrance Oil. The fragrance is a complex blend of smoky tea leaves and bright bergamot with a subtle base of amber. It’s a fantastic uni-sex fragrance oil.

If you’ve never replaced water in your recipe with tea, it’s easier than you think. Simply brew the tea, allow it to cool and mix in the lye like you would with water. The lye solution will become a dark brown, so this recipe contains titanium dioxide to lighten the color. Purple Brazilian clay adds a natural purple hue, while activated charcoal gives a deep grey color.

Because this recipe does contain plenty of titanium dioxide, it has a 20% water discount. The first time we made the soap without a water discount, we got a lot of glycerin rivers (Learn more about glycerin rivers here.) The water discount — or in this case, tea discount — eliminated them completely. The discount also helps to achieve a thick, easy-to-layer texture.

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The Value of Fresh and Local Ingredients + Recipes

March 6, 2017 Filed Under: Tips & Tricks

There are a variety of fresh ingredients that can be added to cold process soap, from honey to goat milk. They are a great way to make your soap stand out, and each ingredient adds special properties to the recipe. For example, goat milk adds skin-loving properties. Honey is great for boosting lather. Using fresh and local ingredients strengthens ties in your community and strengthens your brand identity.

If you sell your products, customers are delighted to know where the ingredients come from. This is especially true if the ingredients are from their local area! For example, here in Washington state, we are known for our coffee consumption and apple production. Adding locally roasted coffee or puree made from Washington apples in your soap is a way to showcase what the state has to offer.

Locally roasted coffee is a great way to incorporate a local ingredient in your soap.

If you’re thinking about adding fresh and local ingredients to your soap, check out the blog posts below. They have information on how to work with alternative liquids, purees and honey, as well as recipes for each. Be on the lookout for recipes this week using local ingredients for more inspiration!

Alternative Liquids (milk, beer, tea, etc.)
In place of distilled water, liquids like milk, tea, coffee and alcoholic beverages can be used to make cold process soap. Using them in your recipe is a great way to highlight locally made goat milk or beer from a local brewery.

Informative Posts:

Tutorials:

Fresh Ingredients & Purees
If a fruit or vegetable can be blended to a smooth texture, it can probably be used in cold process soap! When added to the batter, the puree goes through the saponification process along with the oils and lye solution. Fruit-based purees often add to a fluffy lather because of their natural sugar content. Additionally, many purees are great from a marketing standpoint and can add skin-loving benefits.

Informative posts:

Tutorials:

Honey
Honey is a natural humectant, which means it helps draw moisture from the air to the skin. Adding honey to your products is a great way to support local beekeepers. Honey can overheat in soap, so give your soaping temperatures extra attention.

Informative Posts:

Tutorials:

Is there a fresh and local ingredient that you like incorporating into your products? Be on the lookout for several tutorials featuring ingredients from the Pacific Northwest.

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.

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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.

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