The innagural batch!

I made sure to take pictures to document my kitchen witchery. I'm only posting the stuff I found interesting, not the whole process.

This may look like innocent water, but it's got lye dissolved in it. Lye water is dangerous stuff (hence the trash bag taped to my counter to protect it). Fun fact: lye has an exothermic reaction when mixed with water and it heats itself up! This got to be around 170 degrees just by mixing the lye into the water. 

This is a blend of olive, palm, coconut, and castor oils. No nasty animal fats were required, thank heaven. The recipes with tallow are out there, but EW. Especially since it still smells like animal fat once it's gone through the soponification process. No thank you! I'll take my lovely, animal-free blend any day! 

Once you mix the two together, it looks like pudding! Or maybe cake batter. It really does look like food!

The soap on the left is Au Natural. No colors or perfumes. I guess you can call it my "control group" whereas the rest of the pours I did have fragrance and color added to them. And wow, some cool stuff happened! 

I insulated the soap so it would get hot and go through a gel phase that makes the colors brighter. Some funky things happened during gel phase. Okay, just one funky thing. I only put one color in the batch, but the heat in gel phase made it turn all kinds of blue and purple. I love the effect so I'm not complaining! I'm curious to see if the colors change again during the 6 week curing period.

Here are a couple I popped out of the molds today. Same blue mica as a colorant, different results. I think it's fascinating!

So now I wait. The high PH level from the lye can change the fragrances and colors over time, so I'm dying to know what these will look like at the end of the six week curing time.

Bonus: the molds I used to make these were small yogurt containers that had been generously provided by my family. I love that they serve new purpose instead of going into the trash can.