Testing Floral Waxes in Soap

Some very expensive perfumes are made from absolutes. These are incredibly expensive to buy. From my wholesalers you are looking at fragrances like rose, jasmine and mimosa starting at around $20 for 2 ml and these aren't even the particularly expensive ones. Obviously unless you have very deep pockets you aren't going to use them in soap. For those of you that don't make soap the rate of essential oil use in soap varies depending on the oil but is generally in the vicinity 2-6%.

A by product absolute production these floral waxes are full of lovely phospholipids and of particular interest to me they still retain a significant amount of the scent too. Last year I had the opportunity to import some through a co-op buy with some lovely US soap makers to try them out.

There isn't a lot of information around on using them is soap so I thought I'd just let you know my experience.

I'd received 4 waxes Jasmine sambuc, rose and mimosa from The Perfumery (previously the Essential Oil University) and narcissus from Premier Specialities.

Clockwise from top left - Narcissus, mimosa, jasmine, rose

The first 3 were strongly scented the Narcissus only weakly so.

Thoughts on the scents smelt straight up.

The mimosa smelt softly green with a slightly floral/lilacy scent. The scent was soft but very persistent. I quite liked it but found that it wasn't popular with customers in general.

The rose smelt very much like fresh green moss roses rather than heady floral rose. Lovely in a blend but perhaps not what someone would automatically expect as a straight rose.

The jasmine, extra strong heady jasmine sambuc with the musky notes from the indoles.

Anyway, I melted these in the microwave and added them in the thin stream while stick blending the soap at light trace. This seemed to incorporate them well. The melt point is relatively high so they start to re-solidify at room temperature very quickly, so ideally need melting immediately before use. The saponification value for them was very low. Even lower than beeswax so I ignored this when calculating the amount of sodium hydroxide for the batches and treated them purely as a fragrance.

I tested them all at 3% of the oil weight. At this the scent of the narcissus was lost completely. The rose was quite strong (about right), the mimosa a bit too soft and the jasmine overpowering only those that like their soap super scented would like it at that level.

Jasmine wax soap coloured with charcoal

The jasmine wax noticeably discoloured the soap to a light yellowish tan as shown in this photo. The colour of this soap base is typically off white. The other waxes discolouration wasn't noticeable.

Since I did the initial tests I've been using them in blends with quite a bit of success. If I get the opportunity again, I'll certainly buy the jasmine and rose waxes as they add to the range of affordable scents I can use in making my soap.

Mimosa wax soap with French green clay.

The mimosa I simply can't work out what to do with enough in soap to purchase again. Although if you were into making lotions I could see it being useful.

Note. None of these straight floral wax soap is left to sell. There are a few for sale containing the waxes in blends.

A Batch of Patch.

I made a big batch of Patchouli soap as I have quite a few customers who love it and buy multiple bars of it. I thought I'd take a few shots of the soap as I made it. I forgot to take a shot of the patchouli oil but it is a thick tan syrupy oil that smells the whole house out when I have it open.

Patchouli essential oil is distilled form the patchouli plant which is a herbaceous plant from the tropics which grows a bit like mint. For more see here.

Oil and caustic just mixed

First I weigh out the oils including the patchouli into a large pot (8kg in this batch). I mix caustic soda with water very carefully and stir until clear. The caustic is added to the oils. This is then mixed with a stick blender until it starts to react and gets very thick like a thick custard. Saponification is an exothermic reaction so once it starts it produces enough heat to keep the reaction going until finished.

Freshly poured logs of soap

At this stage I spilt a little of the batch into another bowl and add some cocoa for colour. These are poured into lined wooden moulds and the tops textured with a spoon.

Insulated soap in the moulds

These moulds are then covered to keep in the heat and left to react for about 6 hours. My soap I let gel which basically means it gets hot enough to melt the soap. After the reaction finishes the soap gradually cools down on sets hard.

Cooling soap

Then I take out the logs of soap and allow them to cool down further. The lining material is then removed and the soap cut.

Cutting soap

I use a cutter I imported from the USA to cut my soap AKA the "tank". It basically uses strained stainless steel guitar strings to slice through the soap rather like a cheese slicer. The soap is then lifted out of the cutter.

Soap produced from 8kg of oils

The soap is then carried downstairs to shelves where it cured for a number of weeks. This cure allows extra water to evaporate out and produces a harder bar of soap that will last longer in use.

And yes I do have genuine bright yellow laminex from the 70's on my benches.

I Love/Hate Indigo

Native Indigo - Indigofera australis

You may be wondering why the title well I grow our native indigo and thought it would be fun to extract some indigo from it. I tried following several suggested chemical methods to extract it with no success. Clearly I'm missing some critical point. I only had a tiny bit of plant material left from last time I pruned it. So I put some in a jar to ferment and promptly forgot about it.

Today a few months later I found the jar. Yes, there was a bit of dark ink blue indigo floating on top. But when I opened the jar shall we leave it at it stank. So I won't be trying that again on a larger scale unless absolutely needed. I'll just keep growing the indigo for it's pretty flowers and ability to survive dry shade.

Blue Cypress salt bars - Indigo coloured

I'll still keep using indigo in my soap but I'll stick to buying naturally sourced indigo powder. I love the pretty blue colour it gives and it may fade but that happens fairly slowly and just provides a pretty faded denim look.

One thing I've noticed with my soap is the blue colour seems better when I've let the soap gel.

Playing with in the pot swirls.

This week is was time to stock up on some favourites and try out a couple of new blends. I was having a great week as all the in the pot swirls worked out just perfectly instead of being a bit blobby. I'd had to find a new source for my olive oil which turned out to be quite dark in colour giving me a beige based soap rather the cream base I'd typically been getting, so was affecting the end results giving a lovely earthy feel to the soaps.

Morning Dew olive soap

The first one I was happy with was my restock of my Morning Dew Olive soap as I've nearly sold out of it. I use Australian pink clay and French yellow clay in this one. I soap a little cooler than normal as the rose geranium essential oil in the blend tends to cause a bit of acceleration the reaction.

I love lemon myrtle and when I make batches of this I always think of lemon meringue pie. Over the spring and summer my markets are busier so I like to play around with some new scent combinations. I was playing around with a some lemon myrtle blends and decided to soap a couple of them as well as the straight up lemon myrtle that is always popular.

Tiger's eye soap

Paprika infused olive oil

This one when I cut the soap reminded me of the gemstone Tiger's eye so I think I'll settle on that for its name. I used paprika infused olive oil in this soap. I spilt the batch into two. With one half I pulled out two portions, one I added some oil soluble annatto to and the other I put some French yellow clay to. I poured both of these into the rest of that half for an in the pot swirl. This swirled soap I then poured into the other half of the soap which I added cocoa powder to and swirled them. This mixture was then poured into one of my log moulds. It didn't quite turn out how I had imagined it but I really love all the shades I ended up with. The colour goes quite nicely with the blend of frankincense, lemon myrtle, ginger and vetiver I added to it. This gives a lovely spicy scent I love the smell of frankincense and vetiver.

Moody Blue soap

This soap turned out a little darker than planned and as my oils were darker I got a smokey mauve brown from the alkanet section. I added indigo powder and Australian pink clay to the other sections. I've decided to call this one Moody blue soap for both the blue tones and the blue cypress essential oil I've used in it.

I had a little bit of blue cypress essential oil kicking around from a special project that I wanted to use up. It's a bit hard to find any information on blends with blue cypress. Most of the suggested blends didn't appeal to me at all. But this one at My Skin Studio the keylime sublime inspired me to try a citrusy blend using lemon myrtle as the predominant scent, a little lime, some nerolina, ginger, clary sage and the blue cypress the produced my Moody Blue soap. I'm pretty happy with how it's smelling the lemon myrtle is predominant but the bit of floral nerolina and nice green undertones make it even better.

Moody Blue and Tiger's eye soaps in the mold

I find to get the nice in the pot swirls to work well I need to pour the soap at a fairly thick trace. This is what they look like just poured.

I can't wait until the two new soaps are ready to take to my customers at the market and see what they think.

Looking for a natural green

I love working with natural colorants and these supply lots of fun challenges. I've found some good information on a range of natural colours in soap but not many showing how they perform over time. I  plan on showing some of these changes. Lime and fresh ginger soap coloured with  annatto and chlorophyll This lime and ginger soap is coloured with oil soluble annatto extract (orange) and liquid chlorophyll (green).  I stopped colouring with the chlorophyll as I found that unfortunately when exposed to light the pretty apple green breaks down to an unpleasant brown when exposed to light for any length of time.  On the other hand the annatto only fades slowly over time to a lighter orange/yellow depending in the original intensity. The image below shows the brown colouring due to the chlorophyll breaking down . Brown discolouration of chlorophyll coloured soap This 100% coconut oil soap is around 8 months old and had been taken to market so was exposed to short bursts of intense sunlight. I make mostly castille, a little 100% coconut oil and bastille. This discolouration of the chlorophyll for some reason seemed too occur more rapidly with the soaps containing coconut oil in them than the castille. Blue cypress castille with annatto, alkanet, indigo and Australian pink clay  This blue cypress scented soap was produced by setting up 3 separate in the pot swirls. This was a special soap I made up just for a swap as it is very labour intensive. I also used refined olive oil so I had a white base normally I use extra virgin olive oil which provides a cream soap. The top layer was produced with uncoloured soap and annatto extract The middle layer was produced using indigo powder and annatto extract. The pretty green is a blend of these two.  The bottom layer was a produced incorporating olive oil infused with alkanet, indigo powder and Australian pink clay. This has been stored in the dark for a couple of months without fading.  I'm playing around with using the indigo and annatto blend for a nice green.  Tea tree and lavender soap with French green clay I also like to use French green clay for colour. I love this too but this provides a duller earthy green colour that doesn't fade rather than a bright apple green. The only problem is it can also be difficult to source the brighter green French clays. The colour of the tea-tree and lavender scented soap below is typical of green clay coloured soap.  If anyone has used a nice natural apple green that doesn't eventually turn brown I'd love to hear from you.