Melt and Pour from Scratch

This is my first try on making Melt and Pour soap base from scratch- success and fail. 

Success is that the soap is actually meltable, it´s possible add colourants, fragrances and other ingredients. I would say, it´s also bit transparent. Except lye water, oils, stearic acid and glycerin doesn´t contain any other additives.

Fail- high temperature of melting- it takes some time and it hardens very fast, so no possibility to make any design. The high temperature is causing also "sweating" of the soap. 

You still want to try this? If you already made hot process soap (if not, this is not the right recipe to start), just be super patient and follow this recipe: 

castor oil                  90g     30%
lard                        90g     30% 
coconut oil                 75g     25%
olive oil pomace            33g     11%
stearic acid                12g      4%
glycerine                  300g
distilled water           95,3g
sodium hydroxide          42,8g 

!Safety

Gloves, goggles, long sleeves, ventilated area. When splashing lye water or fresh soap on skin rinse the area with tapped water for 15 min.

• Weight all the ingredients

• Slowly add sodium hydroxide to the water and stir till it all dissolves, let it cool to       38 ℃

• Melt lard and stearic acid, add remaining oils- you don´t have to wait so long till it cools down, when you are doing it this way, this time I worked with temperature around 40℃ (I had to let it cool anaway, because stearic acid needs higher temperature for melting) 

• Put the pot with oils into a pot with water and start to heat (double boiler method, you can use crockpot as well)

• Add lye water to oils and stir, it wasn´t necessary to use stick blender, it traces fast, you have to stir properly and quite fast

• And now starts the patient phase- soap first looks like "usual" one made with hot process method- kind of like vaseline, mashed potatoes

• Add glycerine and stir, now the soap is becoming liquid- this took almost three hours, there was still some unmelted "foam- crust- shell" on the top, which I tried to stir repeatedly and melt

• When the soap is all liquid, but there is still some remaining foam- crust on top, just take it away from the top and pour the soap into mould

 

• Let it cool, unmould next day

Now you can cut the soap to smaller pieces and remelt. As I mentioned in the beginning, it takes some time to melt, but because I didn´t use MP from shop I can be wrong and it´s not that bad. I tried to colour the soap with glycerin colour, added some essential oils and also coffee grounds and it works nice, you just have to be fast while pouring 😊 

 you can see the transparency here

and here melted soap with added glycerin colourant

In the end I want to add the recipe which I followed, but changed the oils. Here is the original RECIPE. 
If you have some ideas and suggestions how to make this recipe better, let me know in comments, I would be very glad 😊