Essential Oils and Soap

Boy do I have a lot to post on essential oils.....it's exciting. I have met a certified aromatherapist that I just adore. She has created an incredible line of products and I am so excited about her essential oil blends. Here's why.....

If you have noticed, fragrance oils cost a lot of money and they are synthetic, not natural. But investing the money into many different essential oils and experimenting with blending them just never appealed to me. I blended a few essential oils that I liked, but I had several combinations that smelled horrible. So I still have about 12 essential oils sitting on my shelf that are doing nothing (I can assure you they cost a couple hundred dollars). None of them smells good on their own....what to do?

What do you do with a blend that doesn't smell good? It is a waste of time, money, and product. I know many soapers use those blends anyway so they aren't out money, but I wonder if those soaps sell at all. I smell a lot of soap everywhere I go to see how it smells. There are lots of soaps that smell just awful. Wouldn't it be wonderful to get some beautiful blended oils that would appeal to a large audience of people? And wouldn't it be great to know the benefit of the blend? I'm honestly looking for feedback here!!

Most websites sell pure essential oils, but I really haven't found anyplace that carries blends that I really wanted to use in my soap. So......I am going to work with this aromatherapist to develop blends that are suitable for cold process soap. I think there is a market for this. What do you think?

Anyway, I've always had several essential oil soaps in my line, but also carried Bath & Body Works or Victoria's Secret's fragrances because they always sold well. I plan to experiment with these essential oil blends and will let you know what I think (you never know how the lye will react with anything, but I haven't had too much trouble with essential oils before).

So, I'll keep you posted!!!

Disappointment Turns to Profit

I thought I'd post a picture of a soap I created that I initially believed turned out disappointingly. This soap is a seasonal soap I make for Christmas. It uses the Sweetcakes fragrance oil called Christmas Spice. Not reading the description very well I didn't notice it had vanilla in the fragrance. Vanilla will always turn your soap brown. SO what I had envisioned:

a creamy white soap with a green and red swirl (beautiful for Christmas!)

What I got:

brown soap with a green and red swirl.

Well, I took the soap to market anyway and sold out. In fact it sold so fast that I have never changed the way I make this soap. The green and red are made from pigments that I had originally bought from the pigment lady on-line. She is no longer in business, but I do recommend getting pigments from Brambleberry now. I'm not sure they have the crimson pigment or the jade pigment I used for this soap, but if they get enough requests perhaps they will carry it. Also they may have colors that will get similar results.

To make this soap I took a couple of cups of soap out of the main pot at light trace and mixed the pigment into them (each color needs its own little container to mix in). Then I poured the main soap into the mold. After pouring the soap into the mold I then poured each green and red into the soap and swirled a little with a stainless steel knife. I emphasize a little because if you swirl too much the color gets blended in and I really wanted a more chunky swirl (which is why I didn't pour the color into the pot before pouring into the mold).

This soap sells well in the fall where I live. I live in the north where Christmas time is coooold and people do lots of holiday baking and this soap is reminiscent of delicious baked goods.

Soap Color Dyes

I was recently asked where to find good soap color dyes. I had always bought my dyes from the Pigment Lady, but she has closed her doors. It took some investigating, but I am very pleased with my results. I would recommend buying pigments from Brambleberry. They carry the same products that I used to be able to buy from the Pigment Lady.

First let me say that there are a lot of spices that dye cold-processed soap very naturally and beautifully and I would highly recommend using spices. But if you want a color you cannot achieve with a spice look at Brambleberry's Mica powders. You need to read the fine print (just like with the fragrances) to be sure the item works properly with cold-process soap. If it says it doesn't work, then don't waste your money....it won't work! I like micas because like spices they are natural. Nothing artificial.

Your next choice may be an oxide. Oxides are not my favorite because I don't really care for the artificial look of many of the colors, but some color blends are very pretty. I prefer colors that are softer versus colors that are neon brite!

Brambleberry does have an instruction page linked to the Micas and Pigments page so be sure to read that, but you will have to learn how much dye you like according to some experimenting. I usually use very little for one batch of soap (maybe only 1/4 or 1/2 tsp.) so error on too little if you are experimenting. Just make sure you WRITE everything down. I guarantee you won't remember the next time unless you do (ask me how I know).

I hope this helps get you pointed in a good direction for soap color dyes.

How to Make Soap

I Finally Did It!

I finally got the monumental job of transferring all my information from my old blog at www.homeschoolblogger.com/milksuds to this blog. It is such a relief that I cannot tell you. For a long time now I have been sending people to my old blog to dig up information. The old blog required a pretty extensive knowledge base of html code. All I know about html code is self taught so that is not much information! I didn't know how to properly organize all the information and I felt terrible asking them to dig through the archives. Blogger makes blogging easy with their neat little wigits and gadgets and such! Now everything is labelled -- neat and tidy and information should be easy to find!

Please be sure to subscribe to the blog and also subscribe to my new yahoo group.

Here are the details on Milksuds yahoo group:
Group home page: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/milksuds
Group email address: milksuds@yahoogroups.com

The yahoo group is only available to individuals who have purchased the on-line/DVD video or my e-book which is soon to be released. This is in an attempt to keep things manageable on my end. I really have thought it would be neat to have a forum for people to share their thoughts, ideas, successes and failures. Don't you think it will be valuable to get input from other soap makers who began just as you did?


On the yahoo group note....make sure you sign up for the individual posts instead of the digest as I don't think (I could be wrong) there will be so many individual emails that it will bombard your inbox.

I certainly hope this organization helps you out!