Making Colored Milk Soap
November 17, 2008
Before we start talking about milk soap a bit about me. I was out of the soaping world for a few months due to a heart attack followed by surgery. But all is well now and I'm happily back to soapmaking. Which, BTW, I pretty much had to relearn. Never again am I going to let that much time pass without making soap (even if I have to get hubby to do the heavy stuff).
now on to the soap. The plate of soap on the left are bars of both milk and water soap that I made while playing around as I got back into the swing of things. Most of those bars are from batches of milk soap. The only exceptions, I think, are the two lavender batches which are not milk soap, but interestingly enough were made with DC&C blue powdered colorant. The dark blue bar next to them was made with milk soap. Interesting, don't you think? One observation I can make is that with time the colors in these soaps are getting discernibly lighter and brighter. Including the two all water batches. Lesson learned here I guess would be never judge a color before its time.
The plate on the right is more interesting. We have 3 batches here all made with the same recipe, yellow FD&C colorant and lemongrass FO. As background my basic technique for milk soap is to freeze it for about 1/2 hour then put it in the fridge for at least 4 hours. With the recipe I'm using that will produce a nice white soap.
The bar on the left skipped the freezer and went directly to the fridge. It is milk soap. The bar in the middle was made with water and spent some time in the fridge. The bar on the right was in the freezer for 1/2 hour then in the fridge. I think if you look closely you can see that there are differences in the color. The milk soap bar that didn't get frozen while a nice yellow is not nearly and bright and sunny as the water bar. The milk bar that got frozen came of out the fridge almost identical to the water only bar. But now a few days later the color has dulled a little. It is still much prettier than the bar that didn't get frozen. What I am trying to determine is whether or not milk soap needs to be frozen. My "lesson learned here" statement probably won't be made for a while. I will be testing a variety of colors and amounts of colorant PPO before I can draw any conclusions on the FD&C colorants. Did a pink batch this morning that so far is lovely. But that's for another day. Stay tuned.
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