The mystery soap

Today, I share something a little bit different on the blog. For my usual readers, that come here for the natural skincare, mindfulness and skin treatment content, this might not be so easy to follow, because today I will write about soap making. More precisely about a soap that I made exactly a week ago, and oh boy, was it a journey. Now if you want to know more on how I made the soap and what happened along the line, sit back, grab a drink and read on. Especially the end bit might be very encouraging for many of you right now.

I always plan all my soaps in advance. In fact I have a list with ideas on my iPad where I put in different ideas with as much detail as I can. About a month before I make a soap (and I do one soap day per month only, where I‘ll make one or maximum two soaps) I look at my list and decide which soap(s) I will make this time. And for April I picked this description:

Tarot, rhassoul clay swirl

Simple, right? Tarot is the name, rhassoul clay the key ingredient. Now during the last few weeks I would look up other people‘s designs with rhassoul clay and stumbled over this video by Future Primitive Soap Company on her Holy Water soap made with two clays. I will link the video for you here. Make sure to check out Tiggy and her Youtube channel and of course her shop, she‘s UK based, so for all the European readers, get yourself some beautiful soap!

Anyway this soap she made uses rhassoul clay and kaolin clay. She does one layer rhassoul, which turns grey-ish and one layer kaolin which is creamy white. She does a pencil line in between. This video gave me the idea to use kaolin clay as well but I knew I wanted a swirl. I had chopstick swirl in mind for a long time and was pretty much set on that. 

On comes the day before soap day. I was in bed, about to fall asleep, you know that moment when you are half awake and half asleep? Well, in that moment and out of nowhere flew an idea into my head. „Do a wall pour, you know the one, that makes those tilted half circles...“ My foggy brain was like.... whaaa? Ok let‘s write that down. So I drag over my iPad, type down wall pour swirl and off I go to sleep till the next morning.

I wake up and immediately remember my inspiration from the night before, so on Google I hop, hoping to find videos or blogs that explain the technique. Mind you, I know this technique only from pictures! I type in wall pour soap technique aaaand.... oh... that‘s not what I was looking for... the pictures that showed up were mostly from the tall and skinny shimmy, but not what I was looking for... I scrolled and scrolled until I eventually found a picture of the technique I was looking for. Ooh, I didn‘t know it was called tiger stripe! And to be very precise, the tilted tiger stripe. On Youtube I hop again and I find a few videos explaining the technique. Good, I know what I have to do now so time to get going.

I soap at my parent‘s house, there is more room there and I have all of my equipment stored there too. I drive over and set everything up, by now I also know which recipe I‘ll use. It‘s from a soaping book, I have used it twice before and have tweaked it here and there. It‘s originally a recipe for a shaving soap but I just love the creamy, luxurious big lather it gives, how decently hard it gets, how conditioning it is, etc. I won‘t share exact numbers here, due to credit to the author of the book, but I will list the ingredients from biggest to lowest amount and you can figure out a similar recipe yourself if you like.

Coconut oil

Olive oil

Sunflower oil or cocoa butter

Castor oil

Essential oil blend of blood orange, cypress, ginger and patchouli (my own blend)

Rhassoul clay

Kaolin clay

Titanium dioxide

Now for some details. Sunflower oil and cocoa butter have almost the same SAP value and in this recipe you can use it interchangeably, you just go with the sunflower oil SAP value, which is the lower one (0.135 vs 0.138). This way, if you use cocoa butter it will just minimally up the superfat. You can do entirely sunflower oil, entirely cocoa butter or 50:50 sunflower oil and cocoa butter. This time I went with full sunflower oil. Next time I think I will go 50:50 again as I have done before.

The castor oil percentage in this recipe is quite high. But the soap isn‘t tacky, slimey or sticky.

I used titanium dioxide along with the kaolin clay to make sure this part of the batter was as white as possible, to make the swirl show up properly.

Now to the making part (this is the perfect way to do it, the fun story starts after):

1. Weigh out your water.

2. Weigh out your lye.

3. Stir lye into water slowly. I do this wearing my gloves, goggles and respiratory mask under the extraction hood on full power. I have prepared a bucket of cold water on the balcony to put the lye container in to cool down beforehand. Once the lye is completely dissolved, I take the lye outside and place it in the bucket until I am ready to use it. This is normally the perfect amount of time to get it down to a bit over room temperature. 

4. Weigh out your coconut oil, melt it in the microwave.

5. Weigh out your olive, sunflower and castor oil.

6. Check the coconut oil, it should be fully melted but notice that the last clumps can be stired in without having to microwave it again. I tend to do 1 1/2 minutes and then stir the rest. This is what I found works well with my microwave. You will have to check with yours as they all tend to behave differently. Start with short intervals, only when you know your tools well, start to up the time.

7. Pour the coconut oil into the other oils. Mix well with a spatula or stick blend for a few seconds, to make sure they are all well incorporated.

8. Split the oils in half, do this with a scale preferably. You will know your total amount of oils from your soap calculator, but what‘s better is to weigh all of your empty containers before soaping, putting the number on the bottom of the container and then once you have all of your oils in the container, weigh them together, substract the weight of the empty container and divide the result by 2. Put your second container on the scale, tare it and pour in the number you calculated.

9. Check the temp of your lye water, mine was at 39°C. Split the lye water solution in half in the same way you did with the oils.

10. Add rhassoul clay to one oil container. Add kaolin clay to the other oil container. I used 1 tbsp rhassoul clay and 1 tbsp kaolin clay. This results in about 1 tbsp of clay per pound of oils as I was working with about two pounds of oils (1 kg to be exact).

11. Stick blend both containers well until the clays are fully incorporated.

12. Add 1 tsp of titanium dioxide to one lye container, add nothing to the other one. Stick blend the TD to fully incorporate in the lye water.

13. Check the temp of oils and lye. Mine where both around mid 30s Celsius.

14. Pour the TD lye into the kaolin oil mix. Pour the neutral lye into the rhassoul oil mix.

15. Bring both containers to emulsion. You will need a thin trace, the batter should be quite runny but not watery.

16. Weigh out your essential oils, split them in half into the soap batters and incorporate with a spatula.

17. Set up your mold. For this technique you need to prop it up on one side so it is tilted towards you.

18. Start the pour, alternating colours, you pour along the lower wall (the one tilted towards you) in a steady stream.

19. Once you have almost reached the lower top edge of the mold, take out whatever you put underneath to prop it up, and continue to pour the remainder of the batter while it‘s standing flat.

20. If you have anything left in your containers, scrape it out and pour it horizontally along the length of the mold in stripes.

21. Take a chopstick or a toothpick and swirl the top however way you please, I did horizontal and vertical stripes along the length and width of the mold. Make sure to stick your swirling tool only about 5mm in as to not mess with the inside of the swirl too much.

22. If you feel like it, spritz the top with alcohol to prevent soda ash.

23. Set up your soap as you always do, be it CPOP (cold process oven process), isolating it, heating pad etc. everything works here.

This all sounded professional huh? In fact, this was the first time that during soaping everything went perfectly, no spills, no oil everywhere, even the coconut oil was soft and didn‘t bend my spoon weird ways as it usually does because the weather here is finally warmer. I didn‘t forget to put in my essential oils as I sometimes do, I managed a technique I had never tried before, the top came out perfectly, I mean... what could go wrong...?

I didn‘t want to CPOP this soap and decided to put it in a shoe box for the first time. So I put it in, put it in the spare bathroom, put a bath towel over it and pat it good night and good bye. My babies all get a kiss before they go off to cure. In fact all my soaps are like children to me as the whole process really reminds me of childbirth and watching those little ones grow and become wonderful adults... uh soaps! „Byebye baby, take care, see ya in two days for the cut!“ And off I go to wash up the soap dishes.

As I said before, I soap at my parent‘s house so from here on my mum was looking after soapy. And she always does a wonderful job, this time even more than usually, as we will see.

The next morning rolls around and mum sends me a pic of the soap, the top looks nicely hardened, the colours have settled from fresh yellow to creamy white, always an indicator that the soap has done its thing. Good, tomorrow it will be even better and I will be able to cut it as planned, WOOHOO!

I arrive at the house the next day, say hi to my parents and hush of to soapy. „Hey baby, how you doing, today‘s the big day, I will see what has become of you!“ I take it out of the shoe box, peel of the liner and... oh no... I don‘t peel off the liner, I peel off half the soap with it. I try the next side, oh dear god it‘s even worse on this side. I prod the top a bit... it‘s rock solid, why is the rest so soft? Maybe this shoebox technique isn‘t the right way to go. Ok so I put it out under the guestroom bed, there it won‘t get in the way of everything and will have plenty airflow to harden up. I shall be back in a few days. My plan is to let it sit another two days, by then, surely it will be manageable. And don‘t do that shoe box thing again, it‘s no good. Says my head...

In the evening, so almost 10 hours later, I ask mum to quickly check on the soap again. „Still the same as this morning, still soft.“ Ugh so the airflow didn‘t really help. I tell her „If it doesn‘t look better by tomorrow night we‘ll throw it in the oven, CPOP surely always helps to harden soaps right up.“ Ok she says. The next day rolls around, text from mum „ I have the oven on, shall I let it cool down to 65 C and put soapy in?“ Yes. Please. That offspring of soap satan needs to harden up now, I AM IMPATIENT. She leaves it in half a day, until the oven is fully cooled down... Check in the evening: „Better, but still soft...“ She tells me. Ya bloody thing are you kidding me? It‘s as if you had a stain on your t-shirt, you bleach it, the entire colour is gone but the stain is still there... How is that possible!? Clearly this soap has a mind of its own, I tell myself that worst case I‘ll put it in the freezer and get it out. It‘s not like there is no way of getting it out at all.

I arrive back at my parent‘s house the next day. I grab the soap and indeed, it‘s a bit better. Ever so carefully I tug and squeeze and push the soap out of the mold. Plonk it goes on the counter, let’s inspect. It has some finger dents but they aren‘t that big or bad., The top part is hard about 1 to 2 cm down, the bottom is soft as... Especially the white part seems a bit softer than the grey. Hmmm. I go on to cut the soap. I have a cutter box that has one of those very flimsy wires attached that is normally never able to cut through anything so I use a knife usually. I had read though that knives and soft soaps don‘t pair too well, they drag too much of the soft soap along, as it will stick to the blade. „This is your moment to shine, flimsy wire, this will be the only time I will use you and love you!“ And it went through like butter... probably because the soap had the consistency of butter... hehe. I managed to cut the most perfectly straight and same sized bars ever. But now how to place them so they can cure properly? The bottom is so wonky, they‘ll fall over, but I do want to stand them up... I guess the top is hard and straight enough, so let‘s put ‘em upside down. And that‘s when I noticed that the tilted tiger stripe actually looks awesome upside down! I go on, cut all my bars and put them on the lined tray I always use to store them on for their cure. I take some pictures now, but know that I will have to take some more outside, the tree design I discovered in the soaps deserves a nicer setting than the kitchen floor. I wash up the last few molds and dishes and go to check back on the soap. It was sticky and tacky just minutes before. Now I touch it and it isn‘t rock solid, but definitely harder, not at all even a hint sticky anymore and feels like a totally normal soap. No soapy, I know you, you‘re not normal and that‘s exactly why you hardened up within minutes in contact with air. You just needed to breathe didn‘t you? You‘re so alive that you just wanted to get out there and live. And I get that, and I guess that‘s where this circle ties up again. After all this IS a blog that focuses on mindfulness, and breathing is essential in my work.

This soap was a good reminder and it showed me, once again, that with everything that we create we put life into, we put soul into. We create something alive. It showed me that even if the beginning might be perfect, the middle might get rocky, and there will be turbulences, but in the end, with a lot of tenderness and trust, we can get there.

It reminded me that being soft isn‘t a bad thing, we might just need some time to harden back up. We might just need to get some air and catch a breath to get where we need to go.

In these times where so many things are uncertain and so many of us might not be able to be soft or to catch a breath, let this be a reminder that it‘s ok to not always be and do as is expected of you. Just do your thing, give yourself some time and go with the flow. I am sending out so much courage and love to every single one of you in these trying times. We can get through this, soaping is a fun way to cope, even though it‘s not the only one. 

Tarot, my child, you are a special one, aren‘t you? I thought I was showing you how soap is made, but instead you showed me. And not only that, you showed me how life is done too. Slowly and softly.

Thank you, if you have made it this far. I hope you liked what you read and if you wish, please stick around for more, there is always room for you here.

I am Inès, the Soul Traveler of this blog.