So I went to a lady who imports african black soap and shea butter directly from ghana. Bought some black soap and lye, a brick of melt and pour, stearic acid, and emulsifying wax, but the emulsifying wax might be a 50-50 cetylstearyl alcohol? damn i cant even spell it. so i will try to make a lotion at some point, but first here are the three different soaps i made, they are for give aways and experimenting.
first soap is african black soap with green clay and mica, dried rosemary chopped up, and rosemary and mint oil
second soap has stearic acid in it, its a red clay and lanolin soap with commercial rose oil and a green leaves fragrance, then its layered with (powdered) milk and cinammon and rhassoul clay. this might turn out gross, but the smell of the soap with the milk powder was so amazing, then i ruined it by adding cinnamon. also the one drop of commercial rose oil and one drop of green leaves fragrance (left over from INCENSE STICK MAKING ten years ago??) smells Amazing, but the clay makes it look like a terra cotta tile. would make a great kitchen soap (shaped like a brick or tile)
third soap is rhassoul clay, the floral wax, balsam, sandalwood, and jasmine. but it doesnt smell like the lotion i made. it smells like tutti fruitti, not sure why, maybe its the alcohol used to mix the clay in the soap. im hoping the weird smell will go away once all the alcohol evaporates. this mold is a paperclip plastic box as the mold and wanted the top to look like the creamy top but it looks like... mud. the bottom and sides are shiny flat. guess you can use any releasable container.
what i learned:
the melt and pour is varied, this one sucks cos its the suspending version of stephensons, which to my horror upon returning home to google the ingredients is all the sls and propolyene glycol,
found a woman online complaining about how rubbery her final product was, which i too find, except the stearic acid bar. it doesnt bend as much, in fact it barely gives.
next up, cutting the bars and testing them. there is a squirt of lotion in one of them...will it lather? its got parrafin...
and then giving some away for feedback.
all in all an enjoyable and crafty experiment. would make a great workshop.
im going to make lye water today for a coconut oil soap with the coconut oil on hand.
the sogomi workshop provided a list of lye and koh saponification values for a lot of oils, per gram. to be precise. the first example in the workbook is a kojic whitening cold process soap which of course im never going to make, but it is a coconut oil based soap and will just add up all the whitening ingredients and add it to the oil, or use botanical extracts-maybe african black soap shreds. the additives come to about 3 grams for a 100 gram bar of soap trial.
the best part about my sogomi workbook is that there is a tagalog translation beside each sentence. its bilingual. for example
#3 . Add the lye solution. BE CAREFUL!
(Idagdag ang Lye Solution. MAG-INGAT!)
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four days later. the rose milk bar is amazing. i dont know how i made it. its all really loose notes and cant replicate the milk part. used a 97% alcohol and water and rhassoul clay and i cant make it the same because i did some weird unmeasured ratio.
so here is the lemon poppy seed soap!
the poppy seed side is with may chang oil and milk powder
and the beige side is rhassoul clay and milk powder and the lemon flavouring which is basically lemon essential oil.
its all bubbles on top :p didnt spray alcohol fast enough.
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originally published on Jan 19
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