Marble Soap Color

I was making some soap today. Two batches that are favorites of my customers, Queen of D'Nile and Moonlit Stroll. These are two that I really enjoy making because they always turn out well. I have the color down pat and the fragrance always behaves the way I want. Of course, now that I have typed that out it is sure to fail, I may have just cursed myself. Anyway, I thought someone out there might be interested in how the marbling process works. I took a few photos and I will share them here.

This first picture is what my kitchen looks like when I am making soap. I know it is a big mess creative hot zone. Can you feel the magic?                                                          

This is my pot with all of my igredients in it; oils, milk, lye, and fragrance. At this point I have already stick blended it to force the oils and liquid to blend.

Before anyone shrieks in horror about lye, let me explain. All soaps are made with some type of fat, a liquid and lye. The differences in soaps can be not only the types of fats (did anyone see fight club?) or liquids (I use goat milk) that you use, but other things that are added. Natural soaps may have things like oatmeal or herbs of all sorts. Big manufacturers add chemicals that help make the soap cheaper to produce. Sometimes they use fats that you don't even want to know where they came from and they have to put it through a process to make it "clean" and "safe". Most store bought, big business soaps are actually detergent bars and not actually soap at all. But back to the lye, you see, every lye molecule has to have a fat molecule to join up with. The two get married and they become soap. Like married people they are no longer the single component that they once were, they have become something completely different, a unified pair you might say. They are no longer fat and lye, they have saponified and become soap. You sometimes hear horror stories about how "back in the day" great grandma's lye soap took off peoples hair or even skin. That was because they had no way to measure things as exactly (by weight) as we do now. Lye was made by dripping the rain water through wood ashes and after they butchered the hogs and rendered the fat they would put an egg in the water to see if it floated. If it floated about mid way in the barrel then they figured it was about right. Scary eh? No wonder they took peoples skin off right? Then they just kind of guessed how much fat to add to get the soap strong enough, but not too strong. Even scarier right? So that is the story about lye and why people are so terrified of the soap made from it. I will add here though that lye does need to be respected. It will take your skin off before it becomes soap. I always wear long rubber gloves and goggles.

O.k. so back to the soap making;

On the right is a portion of soap I have taken out to add some blue color.    

Now I have added some of the blue back into my main soap pot. I like to do this sometimes to have a little color to the base soap. The picture looks a little off but it really a nice soft blue.

 I pour the rest of the dark blue into the pot all over, back and forth and at different heights so that it is spread all though the soap.

Give it one stir through the middle. I want to just barely pull the color through. Over stirring here is a big mistake.

I Pour a little into each of the 4 molds to spread the color throughout. The color really does it's mixing as you pour it. There are other techniques for getting a more defined swirl but I like this effect.

Here it is in the mold and..........

Here are both batches as they set up.

Now this is what it looks like after it is cut. When it has cured for about a month I trim all of the side edges off. I just prefer it beveled for myself and I think it looks nice. Then it gets wrapped in plastic shrink wrap to hold its scent nice and strong and so that it stays clean as well, then labeling and it's ready to sell.