Entry 4 - Soap Making 101

Greetings Class,

First, I want to say that you are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. 

I'll be your guide as we travel through the amazing and complex world of soap making! It takes a bit of chemistry, a bit of cooking, and a bit of creativity to make a luxurious bar of soap. Since I am decently talented at all of those requirements, I figured, why not? Let's make the world smell. Good, that is. 

So first off, what is soap? Well class, I'm glad you asked. Soap is a substance used with water for cleansing, generally made from the combination of natural oils or fats with sodium hydroxide or another strong alkali. So in Fight Club's case, they used human fat as their fat or oil. Unfortunately, that's generally frowned upon, so i opted for a blend of RSPO Palm Oil, Coconut Oil, Sweet Almond Oil, Castor Oil and Beeswax. It's no human lard, but it definitely does the trick.

It's about to get sci-ency, so hold on tight. 

To make the soap, we melted all the solids (palm, coconut, and beeswax), added the liquid oils (almond and castor) and put that aside to cool to about 120F. At the same time, we dissolved sodium hydroxide flakes into water (always sodium hydroxide added to water, as the other way could result in a massively bad reaction), and allowed that to also cool to about 120F. Once everything was all cooled and dissolved, we added them together and pulsed with a hand blender until the mixture began to "trace", which is just a fancy word for the beginning of the reaction. It basically looks like a thin pudding consistency starts to form. Then add your fragrance, in this case we made a Coffee, Vetiver, and Bergamot blend, which smells amazing. (Thanks Lauren for the Bergamot idea, it brightened the whole blend and made the coffee pop!)

We then split the batch into two, adding colloidal oatmeal to one batch, and Heart Coffee grinds (their coffee is absolutely amazing) to the other, to swirl the two formulas together. Add a little of one, a little of the other, and so on and so forth. Then take a chop stick and swirl the mix around and let it setup overnight. I'm still working on getting the blending aspect, but it was my first time so lay off. After 24hrs we pulled the log out of its mold, and cut the bars to size. They came out really nice, and performance is pretty great. I'll be working on these a bit more, and adding them to our site for sale. So I guess we are making soap now, which is cool if you like to not be a stinker. Check out our pics above and share our blog! Comment below and I'll be sure to answer any questions!!!

-Kyle