Learn to make beautiful bath and body products from scratch. Here you find free tutorials for making cold process soaps, bath bombs, body butters, face masks, serums and a lot more.
I’ve been resisting using handmade soap on my face for the longest time. My own handmade soap mind you – where I know exactly how it’s made and what went in. I always had in the back of my mind what had been drilled into our heads at esthetitian school: “Never ever use soap on your face”.
I could see, that for someone with very oily, acne prone skin a nice bar of charcoal tea tree soap could be beneficial, but for my dry and sensitive skin? Uh, no thanks.
…Beware: After 5 weeks of cure time I noticed the two bottom layers starting to fade. I’m working on an updated tutorial for you, in the meantime I hope you find this information helpful nonetheless.
Indigo is an interesting natural colorant to work with in cold process soap. As with most natural colorants you never quite know what you’re going to get. The color results can vary greatly from greenish to grayish blue depending on the type of indigo used and how it’s incorporated into the soap.
You might’ve noticed by now that when it comes to soap I like to experiment with new and different types of ingredients. As it happened this time I had this little bottle with pristine white sand that I brought home from Florida sitting on the shelf taunting me to do something with it. Well, into the soap it went.
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I love avocados! As food they’re delicious, satisfying and super healthy, and they’re also great to use in cold process soap giving it a decadent rich creamy lather that is delightful.
Avocado oil, shea butter and fresh avocado are the key players for this soap. Fresh avocado fruit as well as avocado oil contains vitamins A, D and E and nourishing omega 3 fatty acids. Both contribute amazing conditioning properties and creamy luxurious lather to the finished soap.
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Last month I experimented with different ways to use bananas in soap. I wanted to find a visually pleasing outcome for today’s banana and cream soap. The results ranged from light cream color with a little bit of specks to really brown with lots of specks. You can check out the post here and see the side by side comparison.
For this soap I decided to use a fairly ripe banana since I knew from my experiments that I would get this awesome speckled effect which would contrast well with the white piped top. After I was done making the soap I put it in the freezer since I absolutely wanted to avoid gelling.
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I’ve had this idea for a banana soap in my head for quite some time. Something like a banana cream pie soap maybe. But what would the end result look like and would I be happy with it? I started to do some research and saw a variety of banana soaps that ranged from very brown to very speckled to creamy yellow with few specks. Some soap makers reported the specks would disappear after a while. Well, I decided it was time to do my own little research project on using bananas in soap.
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I live in the Garden State. Yes that’s right, New Jersey. The state known for it’s closeness to NYC, it’s stinky highways, industrial areas, and also it’s beaches. What most people don’t know is that we do have plenty of greenery here, as the name suggests. Folks really love to grow their veggies in our neck of the woods and when summer rolls around, we have cucumbers for dayyys….
This post was originally published on May 8th, 2018 and updated on January 23rd, 2019. I’ve added an update an how the colors and scent have fared over time. So, scroll down to the bottom to see what this soap looks like after 9 months.
I’ve been playing around with botanicals and design ideas lately. I kept wanting to throw stuff (clays, dried flowers, etc) into my lye water, just to see what would happen.
Why – you may ask – would I want to put them into the lye solution rather than the more traditional approach to infuse them in oil? Well, cold oil infusion takes 6-8 weeks and even heat oil infusion takes 2-4 hours on the stove – Mama ain’t got time for that. I also thought this could be an easy way for beginners to get a good color result….
I love to add fresh ingredients to my soaps. It’s a fun way to try something new on a whim since most fruits and veggies are easy enough to come by. I also find that they can bring interest and label appeal to your soaps. In this recipe I’m trying something a little more exotic: papaya paired with turmeric. The result is a wonderfully creamy and nourishing turmeric papaya soap.
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I had this little bottle of precious Vetiver essential oil sitting on my desk for a very long time. My plan was to use it in a cold process soap recipe. Every now and then I would open it and take a sniff. I was intrigued by the thick, viscous amber colored fluid. The smell was like no essential oil I had tried up to that point: woody, earthy with a hint of smokiness.
But I didn’t know what to do with it. I had read up on different ways to blend it with other essential oils, and everyone seemed to say that it was good for anchoring scents, but too much would overpower the blend. What I wanted was to figure out a way to have the Vetiver front and center with supporting notes that would enhance it’s deep masculine earthiness….