Fiber Fool

For a very long time I’ve been a body wash person. Perhaps it was due to the shower situation back on the farm - a 3/4 height cinder block wall with a shower head and a sump pump. It wasn’t exactly conducive to using bar soap, especially with 4 of us using it. It has just been my default soap type. But the ingredient list on liquid soaps is lengthy and definitely not very natural. I’ve had such a good response to using all natural cleansers and moisturizers on my face that I decided eliminating as many chemicals as possible was a good idea.

When I won Lark Craft’s blog contest for the soapmaking and candlemaking books I jumped right in on the soap making. It was easy to do since Soapmaking the Natural Way is all recipes for melt and pour soaps. I was surprised to learn that most melt and pour bases are all natural. I did not have to worry about working with lye or have the curing time for the soap to saponify. I used a 50% coupon for Michael’s and bought a 2 pound Goat Milk base for $4.50 and made two different kinds of soap. I’ve actually been using both daily, but today I’m talking about the Women’s Citrus Shave Soap.

The secret to the shave soap was the use of a clay. The clay helps with the glide of the razor. To get the nice pink soap the clay used was a red Kaolin clay. You just add it into the melted soap base and stir until incorporated. Next time I think I may want to sift it into the melted base as I had a few lumps. The soap works wonderfully for shaving. It produces a really fine lather and I’ve been using it even when I’m not shaving because I love the scent and the feel of it.

In my lotion bar and soap making experiences so far I’ve learned a handy thing. If you work on newspaper it is very easy clean up. If you drop wax around or dribble a bit non-food save oil the newspaper soaks it up. It also allows me to keep my reference books clean. In the image above you can see I set out my three essential oils that were going into the soap and wrote the amount of each needed right next to it. That way I didn’t accidentally drop some essential oil on the book or that, but I had a reference right there at hand! Even though we do not subscribe to a paper we always have plenty around the house since there is a weekly that one appears to not be able to opt out of. It lands at the base of the driveway like clockwork every Thursday.

I did make a slight change to the original recipe. It called for lemon essential oil which I did not have on hand when I made this soap (I’ve since remedied that issue) so I substituted grapefruit instead. The other advantage to using grapefruit is that it is the exception to the rule that citrus essential oils make you photosensitive. Since I had the special bergaptene free bergamont the only photosensitizing ingredient was the lime. I’ve since learned that most feel in soaps and such that the concentration is low enough to not be of concern, but given my fair Scandinavian complexion and our mile high altitude I like to be careful in that regard.

I thought the bars seemed somewhat soft, but I only just finished my first bar yesterday! I started using it the middle of September! That is not bad. While there is some up front cost for things like the clay, jojoba oil and the essential oils (some of which are definitely not inexpensive) I got 8 bars from $2.25 of goat’s milk base (okay, $4.50 if you don’t have a 50% off coupon for Michael’s). Even figuring in the cost of the additives I’m pretty confident that I came in under 50 cents a bar (under a $1 if I paid full price for the base). For 6 weeks of daily showers. It doesn’t get much better than that.