temperature Archives

Why Did My Soap Crack?

June 20, 2016 Filed Under: Tips & Tricks

You poured your soap into the mold and everything looks wonderful. But, when you look at the soap the next day…ack! There’s a huge crack down the center. What happened? There are several reasons why your batch may have cracked. Below are some of the most common cracking culprits, and how to avoid them.

Too Much Hard Oils, Butters, Wax
One reason why a batch of soap might crack is because of the recipe. Soap is more likely to crack if it contains a large amount of solid oils, butters or wax. The potential for cracking is greater with more brittle butters and waxes, such as cocoa butter and beeswax. In general, I recommend limiting the amount of butters to 15% of your total oils, and the amount of beeswax to 8% or less of the total oils. This post has more information about various butters and how to use them in your soap and other beauty products.

Lots of firm butters like cocoa butter can cause soap to crack. I recommend using no more than 15% butter in your recipe to prevent this.

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Troubleshooting Lye Heavy Soap

May 18, 2016 Filed Under: Tips & Tricks

Preparing your work space before making cold process soap is essential. It helps the process run smoothly, as seen in this post. However, as any soaper can attest, even with the best planning you can forget something. Maybe it’s a colorant, a fragrance, or an oil. Trust me, it happens! Not that I’m speaking from experience or anything. 😉

While forgetting a color can change the design slightly, forgetting an oil can result in lye heavy soap that may burn your skin. The soap can also end up lye heavy if the recipe amounts are off, if the ingredients are mismeasured, if the scale isn’t functioning properly, etc. This creates a hard or brittle soap. It may also be irritating or drying to the touch, or have little white pockets that look like air bubbles. Testing the soap is the best way to know for sure.

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The Truth About False Trace

May 9, 2016 Filed Under: Tips & Tricks

Stick blenders are an amazing tool in the soapmaking world. They can emulsify oils and lye in a minute or less, while whisks and hand mixers can take hours. Have you ever had a recipe thicken a little bit too quickly? As in, instant pudding as soon as the lye is added? Don’t toss out that stick blender! You may be dealing with “false trace.”

Trace is the point in soapmaking when the oils and lye have started to saponify. Once the soap reaches thin trace, it will continue to thicken as you work with it. This post has more information on trace. There are two types of false trace: fake emulsification and cool soap. This blog post deals with the cool soap type of false trace. False trace looks like the soap has saponified, as it gets quite thick. However, it is actually oils like coconut or butters like cocoa in the recipe starting to harden and resolidify before the soap is fully emulsified. Below is an example of true thick trace. False trace can look and feel like thick trace, but happens very quickly after the lye and oils are combined.

False trace looks like thick trace, but the soap hasn’t fully emulsified.

What causes false trace?
Temperature is the main cause of super thick fake false trace. When cold or room temperature lye water is poured into the soapmaking oils, it can cause them to harden up. While soft oils like avocado are always liquid, hard oils are solid up to a certain temperature. For instance, avocado butter starts to melt around 90 ° F. Cocoa butter is even higher at 100 ° F. Check out the Soaping in the Summer Heat post for more information on melting points. If adding cold lye to butters and oils that are solid at cooler temperatures, it can cause the oils/butters to cool and thicken on contact.

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Tips for Swirling Melt & Pour Soap

August 5, 2015 Filed Under: Tips & Tricks

Melt and pour soap and cold process soap are both made by emulsifying sodium hydroxide lye and a variety of oils. Both are skin loving and far more gentle than store bought, detergent based soap. Despite these similarities, melt and pour soap have very different textures. These textures lend themselves better to different soaping techniques. For example, it’s easier to achieve straight layers with melt and pour soap, while the fluid texture of cold process soap allows for easy swirling.

Melt and pour soapers often ask if swirled cold process soap recipes can be recreated with melt and pour soap. Unfortunately, the answer is usually no. Cold process soap batter has the ability to stay fluid for a long time. This fluid texture is crucial for dragging the soap with a chopstick, dowel, hanger swirl tool or comb swirl tools. Melt and pour on the other hand, begins to harden once it cools to about 125 ° F, which only takes a few minutes. For example, as shown in the how to do the Peacock Swirl in Cold Process Soap video on Soap Queen Tv, the soap must be fluid and workable during the mixing, pouring the swirling process which can take 10-20 minutes!

While it’s not possible to recreate complex cold process swirls with melt and pour, swirls are still achievable…they will just look a little different =). Check out the Soap Queen TV Episode 3: Swirling M&P above to see an example of the beautiful swirls you can create in melt and pour. The key to creating swirls with melt and pour soap is temperature. When liquid, melt and pour soap is much thinner than cold process soap. The causes the colors of melt and pour soap to easily blend together. When attempting to swirl melt and pour soap, this can cause a muddled look rather than defined swirls. As melt and pour soap cools, it also becomes thicker. The cooled, slightly thicker texture helps avoid the colors from swirling together too much.

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Facebook and Instagram Photo of the Week (July 18th ~ 24th)

July 24, 2015 Filed Under: Bramble Berry News

There are many factors to consider when making cold process soap. This week and next week will focus on the basics of soap making. One of the most important parts is safety. When working with sodium hydroxide lye, it is important to wear safety gear like goggles, gloves and long sleeves. With the correct precautions, soaping is a safe process. Learn more in the Back to Basics: Lye Safety Guide.

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Back to Basics: How Temperature Affects Cold Process Soap

July 22, 2015 Filed Under: Tips & Tricks

Today is the next lesson in the Back to Basics Cold Process Series. Today, we are reviewing how temperature affects cold process soaping. If you missed yesterday’s Basic and Simple Cold Process Soap, be sure to check it out! It’s the perfect recipe for the beginner soaper. Tomorrow will feature another cold process tutorial including butters and essential oil. If you’d like to receive all the ingredients to make all the projects in this series, the Back to Basics Soapmaking Kit contains everything you need!

Cold process soap making is a science. It involves mixing oils and lye solution to begin a chemical reaction known as saponification. Like any scientific process and reaction, it’s important to be precise and consistent. For soap making, these means carefully measuring and mixing ingredients and controlling for factors such as temperature.

The temperature of cold process ingredients (the oils and lye solution) can greatly affect the final product. The temperature of your soaping area also affects your results. If you were to ask advanced soapers, “What is the perfect soaping temperature?” you would receive a wide range of answers. This is because it depends greatly on the particular recipe and design. For most soapers, the preferred temperature of soaping lye and oils are 120-130 ° F. In addition, many soapers and books believe it is helpful to have the lye and oil within 10 degrees of each other.

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When to Insulate Handmade Soap

June 10, 2015 Filed Under: Tips & Tricks

Temperature plays a very important part in soaping. It can affect the trace, color, texture and scent of your final soap. In general, we recommend soaping at around 120-130 ° F. This means that both the lye and oil are this temperature range immediately before the two are combined and the saponification process begins.

An important factor that affects the temperature of your cold process soap is insulating it after it has been poured into the mold. Insulating the soap involves covering the mold with a lid or homemade device (we often use cardboard) to keep the soap warm. In addition to covering the soap with a lid or cardboard, you can also wrap the mold in a blanket to insulate. For soap that has a textured top, I recommend creating a “tent” with cardboard and cover with a blanket to ensure the top of your soap is not smashed. Below is a soap covered in cardboard and wrapped in a blanket. I always write a little note so people don’t disturb the soap =)

Above, soap is being insulated with a lid and cardboard to promote gel phase.
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How to Avoid Burnt Melt & Pour

May 13, 2015 Filed Under: Tips & Tricks

Melt and pour soap making is great for beginners. It does not require working with lye, and is easy to customize with color, fragrances and molds. While usually considered an “easy” project, melt and pour can be a little finicky when it comes to temperature. If melt and pour gets too hot, the base will burn and becomes difficult to work with. The key to avoiding burnt melt and pour? Patience!

Bramble Berry melt and pour bases begin to melt at around 120 ° F. The bases begin to burn when they become hotter than about 140-150 ° F. Melt and pour soap should never boil. If it begins to boil, you know it has been burned. When working with melt and pour I recommend always having a temperature gun nearby!

Melt and pour soap can be melted in the microwave or in a double boiler. If using the microwave, be sure to use short bursts of heat. Remember, you can also microwave the soap for longer…but once the soap is burned, there is no going back! Melting melt and pour soap in a Crock Pot or saucepan is not recommended, as the direct heat can easily burn the base. If you get a Crock Pot or turkey roaster that has multiple heat settings (low, medium, high) and melt the soap slowly and carefully, that can work. The multiple heat settings are key!

If your melt and pour begins to boil…you know it’s burned!

Burned melt and pour may smell unpleasant, and may become cloudy. In extreme burn cases, the soap can become yellow or brown-ish in color. Burned soap often develops a thick, gloppy texture once cooled slightly. This thick texture makes pouring smooth layers difficult, and creating small details becomes next to impossible. Unfortunately, once your soap has been burned and has turned into a gloppy texture, there is no way to achieve the fluid texture of not-burned soap. Burned soap is still safe to use…it just does not smell or look very pleasant. The best thing to do with gloppy, burned soap is heat it to a liquid texture, and pour into a heat safe container or mold.

In the photos below, the soap reached temperatures of over 200 ° F. You may notice the color has a slight yellow tint in the photo on the left. It did not smell very good, and there was a lot of steam coming off the soap. While unpleasant to smell, the soap was still liquid and workable. On the right, the soap has cooled to about 150 ° F. At this temperature, unburned melt and pour would be fluid. But, because this soap was burned so badly, the soap has become a thick, jello-like consistency even at 140 ° F.

On the left, the burned soap has taken on a slightly yellow color. On the right, the burned soap has cooled slightly but has taken on a gloppy, unworkable texture.

The first step to avoid burning your melt and pour is to cut the bases into small uniform pieces. When the pieces are different sizes, they melt at different rates. This can lead to a bowl of hot and liquid melt and pour with large un-melted chunks.

Cutting the melt and pour into small, uniform pieces helps the soap melt quickly and evenly.

If your container of liquid melt and pour contains chunks, be careful not to over-microwave and burn the melted soap. Remove the bowl from the microwave and stir for 30-60 seconds to allow the hot liquid soap to melt the chunks. Place the container back into the microwave and use small bursts of heat. Continue to stir between each burst until all the chunks are melted. Below, you can see a bowl of melted soap that still has large chunks. But, it is already at 132.2 ° F…more microwaving could cause the soap to burn. Time to stir, stir, stir and melt in 10 second bursts between each stir. If the chunks of melt and pour are really large, remove them from the mixture and melt separately.

If melting large amounts of melt and pour (multiple pounds), a double boiler may be your best option. In the Soap Lab, we use industrial size warmers for melting large amounts of soap. When melting smaller amounts of soap, be extremely careful. Melting less than 5 ounces of soap is tricky; it’s very easy to burn small amounts of melt and pour soap. If you are melting less than 5 ounces in the microwave, use 5-7 second bursts and stir in between each burst. Melting closer to 1-2 ounces? Use 3-5 second bursts. Remember, it’s always easier to microwave the soap for longer!

It’s so easy to burn small amounts of melt and pour. Be sure to use extremely short bursts, and stir in between each burst.

The key to melt and pour that’s fluid but not burned is patience. It’s so tempting to stick a container of melt and pour in the microwave for a minute or two and walk away…but don’t do it! Melt and pour requires short bursts in the microwave with stirring in between. Your patience will be rewarded with melt and pour that is thoroughly melted, and easy to work with.

How do you melt your melt and pour pieces? If you have any tips, I’m all ears! Do you prefer the microwave, or a double boiler?