Soap and Bubble Bars -- Recent Progress
Here's some of what I've been up to with making soap and bubble bars. Photos are included. As always, you can click them for a larger view.
- I've tried making some bubble bars, and while they make a tremendous amount of bubbles and smell great, I still have to figure out some things. Some have turned out too hard and dry, whereas others have turned out too crumbly and fell all to pieces when I sliced them. I sometimes get whiffs of a faint, detergenty odor when I use them. I had problems with colors changing or fading with some of the bars. I don't know if I'm doing something wrong or if I just need to find or concoct another recipe. Here is the recipe I'm using (I found it here):
- 5.25oz Baking Soda (about 2/3 cup)
- 5.25oz Sodium Lauryl Sulfoacetate (SLSA) (about 2/3 cup)
- 2oz Cream of Tartar
- 1oz Glycerin
- 1oz liquid surfactant (I use Cocamidopropyl Betaine.)
- 1oz fragrance oil
- Colorant
- I came up with an almost dead-on imitation of the Lush Blue Skies Bubble Bar scent and made soap with it. I hope I can replicate it again, because I kind of lost track of how much of the different fragrances I used (it consists of patchouli, frankincense and cinnamon, in that order). I think I know in general how much I used of each, but I'm not sure. I think it went something like this: 1 TBSP patchouli essential oil, 1 1/2 to 2 tsp of frankincense oil (which is expensive stuff, BTW) and 1/4 tsp of cinnamon fragrance oil (I probably could have gone with a little less, like 1/8 tsp). I used a hemp oil soap base and it turned out really nice. Now, I can enjoy my Blue Skies bubble bars with soap that matches! (The soap looks green in the picture because the hemp soap had more of a greenish color than it usually does. I added some blue coloring to it, but you can't really see that in the photo.)
- I made some really awesome Oatmeal, Milk and Honey soap. I used Sweet Cakes' OMH fragrance oil, two pounds of their goatmilk soap and two pounds of their honey soap. I mixed the goatmilk soap with about 1/4 cup of colloidal oatmeal (purchased from Well Naturally), poured it in a loaf mold, let it set for about five minutes, and then poured in the honey soap. I pulled a knife through to slightly mix them enough to get a nice marbled effect. Then, after the soap hardened, I sliced the loaf with a crinkle cutter. It came out wonderfully. I think the next time I make it, I will use a little more colloidal oatmeal -- maybe 1/3 or even 1/2 of a cup. This is my second batch of OMH soap. The first batch was almost as nice as this one...it didn't look quite as pretty. The main differences were that I used one pound less soap, a little more colloidal oatmeal, and the honey soap I used was from a different company, so it was a much lighter color (which means the marbling effect was not nearly as dramatic).
- One thing I tried with the bubble bars was to make an OMH version of it, with colloidal oatmeal, whole milk powder and honey powder (all purchased from Well Naturally) added to it. I thought it was going to come out awesome. Looking at this picture, you can see why I thought so:
However, I ended up disappointed with the result. It was very crumbly and fell apart when I tried to slice it. Also, the white in the bar didn't stay white and turned a kind of putty color, which ruined the swirl design (the oatmeal, milk and honey fortified part of the bar was a tan color that was supposed to swirl with the white part of the bar). As I mentioned earlier, I have had problems with the color changing in some others I have made as well. This is strange because some I've made did not change to a putty color.
Here are some more photos of soap and bubble bars I've made --
Rice Flower & Shea with embeds:
Two-tone layered Sandalwood soap:
These are the Cranberry Spice and Lilac bubble bars respectively. They did not change colors:
These are the Pink Sugar bubble bars. Like the OMH bubble bars, they ended up turning into a putty color for some reason. They also turned very hard, which makes them more difficult to crumble and dissolve:
