Making soap

I had my first introduction to cold-process soap making last year, on a cold, snowy, blustery day. My friend Sara ordered a kit from thesage.com (I think), with pre-measured oils & lye. We mixed the ingredients together, and waited, and waited, and waited until it finally came to trace. We added the recommended amount of scent, poured it into the included cardboard mold, and let it sit out. A few weeks later, Sara gave me some of the cured soap. It was ok, but the bars didn't really retain any of the scent, and the whole process was very non-mystical and un-Mr. Wizard-like.

Last December, I decided I'd like to try this all over again, but without a kit. I wanted to choose the oils, the scent, the coloring, and I wanted to play with dangerous chemicals. I went to the local neighborhood hardware store to get goggles & gloves, and ordered some lye, dye, scents, and fixed oils from bittercreek.net. I used an online lye calculator to configure the ratios and percentages of oils and lye for a 1-pound batch of soap. I came up with:
Olive oil: 45%
Rice Bran oil: 25%
Coconut oil (76 degree, solid) : 15%
Soybean oil: 10%
Castor oil: 5%

I added these together, with the lye, and decided on adding some nice reddish-pink soap dye to the mix. I added the two scents: Vanilla Bean & Pomegranite. It might sound weird, but it's a great combination of a warm & cozy basenote with a bright, fruity top note. Unfortunately, what I did not know was that vanilla-scented fragrance oils will turn soap batches brown. So I was stuck with brown soap. Not that there's anything wrong with that. It's just not reddish-pink. ;) Overall I"m pretty satisfied with it; it lathers well, doesn't dry out my skin, and it has a pleasant scent in the shower.

Last Saturday, after Sara & her bf kidnapped me to help them use up a $50 gift certificate at a Cuban restaurant (btw, total yum), she and I made up a new batch of soap. We used the lye calculator to figure out a 1.5 pound recipe based on what oils I had lying around. We came up with:
coconut oil (76 degree): 33%
soybean oil: 25%
grapeseed oil: 23%
rice bran oil: 12%
castor oil: 7%

I had just gotten a bunch of oil samples from 3 or 4 different companies that day, so we used one of the new scents. It's a dupe of Sugar by Fresh. It is a very clean, bright, sugary citrus fragrance. We also had some powdered pigment that Sara brought over to dump into the soap.

The batch went pretty well, and when it got pretty close to trace, we threw in the green pigment, and about 1.5-2 oz of the fragrance. I think the scent accelerated the trace quite a bit, so when we were finally ready to pour it into the various molds, it was super thick. I think too thick for anything but a loaf-mold. But we smooshed some into various shaped molds, and put them away for the saponification process.

I unmolded two of the bars from the flexible molds today. The soap seems rather soft still; the other not-so-flexible molds won't release, so they are currently in the freezer in preparation for my cursing and wailing in an hour or so. A lot of the mold detail in these has been lost, and I can see pretty lumpy air bubbles in the others. I'm willing to forgive it because they just smell SO amazingly good. Like whoa.

Oddly enough, this batch has a higher hardness factor than the other batch I made. Hopefully the curing process will help firm them up. I think the vanilla soap was pretty mushy when I unmolded it, but that was 2 months ago, and my memory isn't what it used to be. I guess I'll find out in 2-4 weeks time.

I may make another .5 or 1-pound batch later today with another of the scents that I ordered. I tracked down a dupe of Gap's "Om," a scent I wore a lot in college, discontinued long ago. It's a nice woodsy-incensey fragrance, and I cannot wait to scent everything in the world with it. I also found some other great dupes, like Bath & Body Works "Warm Vanilla Sugar," Aveda "Rosemary Mint," and Gap "Grass." But first I have to wash all the dishes in my sink & all the equipment left over from Saturday. I guess it all depends on how lazy I am today, and how many zombies I can kill in this game.

Wish me luck unmolding the other bars!