Soap

I used to make handmade soap in Mexico. It took months to learn and perfect a recipe and figure out how to make it really well. Fast forward a few years, my mom decided we needed to make it at her house every time I am there, and we keep it on hand for gifts, and of course use it exclusively ourselves. We use wonderful ingredients and essential oils for scent. It is a big process and we make about 4 15-pound batches each time. It is so fun to make. I need to take more pictures of the process, but it is hard when I am making it myself. Here are a couple of pictures that I did catch last time.

The orange one is a delicious "wassail" scent. There is orange, clove, lemongrass and grapefruit in it. We colored it by infusing paprika into some of the base oil over a period of months. After straining the paprika out, we added it to the soap during the process. Beautiful color!

This one is a lavender/eucalyptus scent. The black spots are poppy seeds, which are a great exfoliant in the soap. The light cream color is achieved by leaving it alone :-) No coloring was added, the two essential oils are extremely non-discoloring so the color ends up pretty pure. Beautiful.

I use it for face and body. I notice a huge difference from commercial soap. This is a true lye-soap. (Not a glycerine melt-and-pour.) The process is begun by adding lye crystals to water. This produces a very strong chemical reaction, as the lye dissolves the water heats to over 200 degrees. This is done outside because of fumes.

While letting that cool outside, indoors we weigh all of the solid oils and add them to a huge pot to melt. These oils are coconut oil, palm oil, and shea butter.

After those melt, we cool that down by weighing and adding the liquid oils, which are olive oil, canola oil, and castor oil (makes lovely bubbles and also great for the skin).

When the lye has cooled to 110 degrees, and the oils have done the same (sometimes requiring re-heating and always requiring exact timing), we add the lye solution to the oil mixture. Then a stick blender is used to mix. When the ingredients have combined, we add the essential oils. Not long after that, the liquid soap comes to a consistency called "trace." This is where is is a thin pudding-like texture, and if you drip the soap across the top, you can see the drops stay in form on top. Very quickly after that stage it starts to thicken FAST, so pouring is pretty stressful. We have several log molds, lined with plastic. We pour, smooth it out, cover with plastic and then wrap with 4-6 bath towels to insulate.

A few hours later, the soap undergoes a chemical reaction called "gelling." From the center outward, it turns a darker, more translucent color. This takes hours, but then later, lightens up a bit and cools. The next day it is ready to be removed from the molds and be cut. The house has smelled divine since the soap was mixed, and cutting is fun!

After cutting, the soap is set into boxes or pans like the picture above, to cure. It takes a minimum of four weeks for the soap to mellow and finish the chemical reactions. Raw soap and new soap are quite harsh to the skin. Soap our ancestors used to make for laundry was hard on the skin always. With modern soapmaking techniques, we calculate each oil and the amount of lye it takes per ounce to "saponify" the oil (make into soap). We then add between 5-10% more oil than the lye is able to saponify, which is called "superfatting." This makes it delicious on the skin, and not drying at all. Once the soap is made, there is no more lye in the soap, it has changed chemically to soap.

An interesting fact about soap is that glycerine is a by-product of the process. It is present in large quantities in handmade (and commercially made) soap, but in the commercial products, much of the glycerine is removed and sold as a product itself. Because it is still present in this soap, it is very hydrating and gentle on the skin. D has used it to shave with exclusively for years.

So, now you know :-)