Botanical Formulations

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Green clay soap in rose log mold - Tutorial

This is a beautiful soap made fresh yesterday. I used a combination of Spirulina powder and green clay to colour.  It is a combination of palm oil, coconut, olive and sunflower oils. Its pretty easy to make and I will assume you know the cold process method in order to make it.

It involves the world renowned 'dollop' or 'plop' method which is only for the highly skilled cold processed soap maker. I made it with  450g of oils which fills this mold and a little extra for one small bar of soap. Its superfatted to 5%. I have given a combination of weight and volume measurements. Obviously this is isn’t good lab practice, but I just wanted to make a quick soap, so forgive me!

Ingredients:

135g  Palm Oil

135g Coconut oil

135g  Olive oil

45g Sunflower oil

1 heaped teaspoon green clay

1/2-1 level teaspoon Spirulina Powder

7.5g Lemongrass essential oil 7.5g

Peppermint oil

171g water

64.65g sodium hydroxide (NaOH)

Method:

Before you start run everything through a lye calculator - Soap calc is a good one

  1. Combine sodium hydroxide and water (always pour the NaOH onto the water) and stir. Set aside to cool

  2. In a heat proof container, weigh the coconut and palm oil and heat until melted

  3. add the olive and sunflower oil and allow to cool

  4. with a little oil mix the green clay and add it to the oils

  5. add the lye (water and sodium hydroxide mix) to the oils and use a stick blender to mix until it reaches trace

  6. Take out a small amount of soap batter and add the Spirulina. This is to stop it getting lumps and then spoon in probably about 3-4 tablespoons of soap batter. Add more Spirulina if you want a deeper green colour. Add more soap batter if you need more.

  7. Then using the dollop method literally plop the Spirulina soap batter into the mould in a kind of lackadaisical way to ensure that it has unevenly covered the bottom of the mold.

  8. Gently mix in some of the Spirulina batter to the main batter so that it is only slightly mixed in.

  9. Pour into the mold and leave to set for 24-48 hours - the longer the better or the petals will break (like what happened to mine!)

So there you go! This is an easy to make - but absolutely lovely natural soap.