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 Aside from being natural and good for your skin,
handmade soaps also make perfect gifts for holidays and special occasions.
Unlike the regular bath soaps which are manufactured by companies using who
knows what ingredients, handmade soaps are better and safer because at least
you know the ingredients that you used since you are the one who made it. You
also have a free rein on how much fragrant to add.
Today, soap is rarely viewed as a basic hygiene
product to clean oneself with in the shower, but rather as a bathroom
accessory.
It's no longer a boring white bar that plagued our childhood - it's nice
to
smell and touch, smooth or coarse, transparent or matte, with consistent
texture or intricate patterns. In a word, it's a handmade soap.
The earliest recorded evidence of the production of
soap-like materials dates back to around 2800 BC in Ancient Babylon. A
formula
for soap consisting of water, alkali and cassia oil was written on a
Babylonian
clay tablet. The Ebers papyrus indicates that ancient Egyptians bathed
regularly and combined animal and vegetable oils with alkaline salts to
create
a soap-like substance.
Soap is derived from either vegetable or animal
fats.
Soap can also be made of vegetable oils, such as palm oil, and the
product is
typically softer. If soap is made from pure olive oil it may be called
Castile
soap or Marseille soap. Castile is also sometimes applied to soaps with a
mix
of oils, but a high percentage of olive oil.
An array of saponifiable oils and fats are used in
the
process such as olive, coconut, palm, cocoa butter, hemp oil and shea
butter to
provide different qualities. For example, olive oil provides mildness in
soap;
coconut oil provides lots of lather; while coconut and palm oils provide
hardness. Sometimes castor oil can also be used as an ebullient. Most
common,
though, is a combination of coconut, palm, and olive oils.
The most popular soapmaking process today is the
cold
process method, where fats such as olive oil react with lye, while some
soapers
use the historical hot process. In both cold-process and hot-process
soapmaking, heat may be required for saponification.
Cold-process soapmaking takes place at a sufficient
temperature to ensure the liquefication of the fat being used. The fat
may be
kept warm after mixing to ensure that the soap is completely saponified.
Unlike cold-processed soap, hot-processed soap can
be
used right away because lye and fat saponify more quickly at the higher
temperatures used in hot-process soapmaking.
Hot-process soapmaking was used when the purity of
lye
was unreliable, and this process can use natural lye solutions, such as
potash.
The main benefit of hot processing is that the exact concentration of
the lye
solution does not need to be known to perform the process with adequate
success.
Cold-process soapmaking requires exact measurements
of
lye and fat amounts and computing their ratio, using saponification
charts to
ensure that the finished product is mild and skin-friendly. A
cold-process
soapmaker first looks up the saponification value of the fats being used
on a
saponification chart, which is then used to calculate the appropriate
amount of
lye. Excess unreacted lye in the soap will result in a very high pH and
can
burn or irritate skin. Not enough lye - and the soap is greasy. Most
soap
makers formulate their recipes with a 4-10% discount of lye so that all
of the
lye is reacted and that excess fat is left for skin conditioning
benefits.
The lye is dissolved in water. Then oils are
heated,
or melted if they are solid at room temperature. Once both substances
have
cooled to approximately 100-110°F (37-43°C), and are no more than 10°F
(~5.5°C)
apart, they may be combined. This lye-fat mixture is stirred until trace
(modern-day amateur soapmakers often use a stick blender to speed this
process). There are varying levels of trace. Depending on how additives
will
affect trace, they may be added at light trace, medium trace or heavy
trace.
After much stirring, the mixture turns to the consistency of a thin
pudding.
Essential oils, fragrance oils, botanicals, herbs,
oatmeal or other additives are added at light trace, just as the mixture
starts
to thicken. The batch is then poured into molds, kept warm with towels,
or
blankets, and left to continue saponification for 18 to 48 hours. Milk
soaps
are the exception. They do not require insulation. Insulation may cause
the
milk to burn. During this time, it is normal for the soap to go through a
gel
phase where the opaque soap will turn somewhat transparent for several
hours,
before once again turning opaque. The soap will continue to give off
heat for
many hours after trace.
After the insulation period the soap is firm enough
to
be removed from the mold and cut into bars. At this time, it is safe to
use the
soap since saponification is complete. However, cold-process soaps are
typically cured and hardened on a drying rack for 2-6 weeks (depending
on
initial water content) before use. If using caustic soda it is
recommended that
the soap is left to cure for at least four weeks.
Handmade soap differs from industrial soap in that,
usually, an excess of fat is sometimes used to consume the alkali
(superfatting), and in that the glycerin is not removed, leaving a
naturally
moisturising soap and not pure detergent. Superfatted soap, soap which
contains
excess fat, is more skin-friendly than industrial soap, though if too
much fat
is added, it can leave users with a greasy feel to their skin. Often,
emollients such as jojoba oil or shea butter are added at trace (the
point at
which the saponification process is sufficiently advanced that the soap
has
begun to thicken), after most of the oils have saponified, so that they
remain
unreacted in the finished soap.
When buying a handmade soap, make sure that you do
not
have allergy to its ingredients because a number of fragrants, even if
they are
natural, may be bad for your health. If you don't have this problem, you
can
buy a handmade soap for you and for your friends. Handmade soap is a
great present
for a woman who can appreciate its flagrance and original shape and
texture.
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