Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hi, my name is Sandra. I am a soap maker honestly by accident. It started when my mom wants to have extra money and she tried to find a way to get that. She was trying to make a small-scale dropshipping business, but then, she got tricked by the vendor. After that accident, her friend invited my mom to join the Soap Making Class. Long story short, I interested in making the soap too. We bought the equipment and started to make our own soap. Then, it becomes my hobby until now. I can make my own personalized soap which really suits my skin. It really exciting experience and that's why I want to share my knowledge with everyone here. Okay, back to your class, you will learn about The difference of soap methods the chemistry behind the soaps, Oils and how to use them in the soap How to use the soap calculator, because so many of people really confused about this. Step- by step of the soap making process and you also can make your own soap too! The last is how to store it. Are you ready? Great! Let's begin our class.
2. Pick your Best Soap Method: Do you ever know about Soap Making Methods? Like Cold Process, Hot Process, melt and pour, and rebatch? or Do you ever try to use one of those methods? and what's the difference between every method? Okay, the First method is the easiest method to make, it named Melt and Pour. You just need to melt the soap base. Adding in your goodies like color, scent, botanical, or anything else, and pour it into another mold. Yep. In this making process, you only need a soap base, which already being saponified like this So you won't use any lye. And because of that, you can use this method with children as young as four, but still with parental supervision. Now, I will let you know about the great and not so good things about this method. The good things of Melt and Pour are, first working with melt and pour, doesn't need a lye. Because of that, you don't need to wear any safety gear. The soap can harder in several hours. And doesn't need to cure like in another methods. Then if you add fragments oil, it doesn't cause acceleration, ricing and seizing. And then if you want to put glitter or shimmery mica, they can really pop out, especially in the translucent base. And the last good things about this method is clean-up is super easy, because your dishes are coated in fully ready-to-use soap And what not so good things about these methods. These soaps will contains extra glycerin. so it’s prone to sweating. Sadly, you can choose the material inside the soap because saponification process was already happen in the base. You even can’t add fresh ingredients, it will eventually go bad in the bars. Melt and pour soap cools and hardens quickly, that means some swirl are impossible with melt and pour.
Soap can burn, which makes the base thick, gloopy, and difficult to work with. The next one is the best method that I love so much, it called as cold process. You can personalize your soap, put your creativity on it, and explore your recipes endlessly. Yay! In this method, you will make a soap completely from scratch, which means which means you need to use lye and oils in the process. Yep. It feels really difficult at first, but once you know the basics, BOOM! it will become so much fun to make. I will focus on these methods in this class. In the cold process have a good things and bad things do. The good things about cold process are, this method will allows you to customize every single ingredients. Because of that, you are able to add fresh ingredients like milk and juice in the recipe. The tracing process can be manipulated for a variety of techniques and designs. And the last good things is the thick texture makes it great for suspending heavier additives And how about the bad things? Cold process contains lye, so it can be dangerous if it's handled incorrectly. Then it takes about four until six weeks to cure. Some colorants can morph in the high pH In the cold process, fragrance oil can react with the height pH. And if you want to use glitter, it won't be show up very well And then, not like in another methods, you just can cleanup the equipment easily after a day. The next one is hot process. The process of making is almost the same as the cold process method. The difference is the source of heat which used to accelerate the chemical reaction for creates soap or commonly known as saponification. You will need a crockpot or double boiler as the heat source. Owh! The hot process is really great for you ho want the soap ready to use much sooner. You don't need to wait for the curing process, like in the cold process. Now, this is the plus and minus of hot process. The good things about hot process, when you are using hot process, you will need additional heat source. And then, the heat can speed up speeds up the saponification process, because of that soap can be cut within one day and used right away You can customize every single ingredients, including oils. The bar itself will have a rustic appearance. and a less smooth texture. The thick texture makes it great for suspending heavier additives. And the last good things is clean-up is super easy. And what not so good things about this methods? The thick texture of hot process soap makes some techniques difficult. If the fragrance or essential oil which has a low flashpoint, its scent can be fade away. Soap has possibility to overflow, it’s important to not leave it unattended. And then, the last bad things is, It's difficult to add fresh ingredients. The last is rebatching. This type is a combination of other soap methods. After you create your own cold process or hot process soap, you remake it by shredding or grating the soap down, melting it by applying heat, and then adding color, scent, or other additives before molding it. So, it will become a new soap. Now, I will let you know about the great and not so good things about rebatching. The good things about rebatching is you don't need to work with lye, so that it's really great for beginners because the base is already made. Rebatch soap is a great way to save batches of soap that didn’t turn out quite right. The soap can be used after one until two weeks, but it can be used as soon as it's cut. The bars have a rustic appearance and a less smooth texture. And the last good things is, the cleanup is super simple. And the not so good things about this process are, the recipe can't be customized. Fresh ingredients like milk and juice will eventually go bad in the soap. Like in the hot process, if the fragrance or essential oil has a low flashpoint, its scent can be fade away. And the last bad thing is due to the thick texture, swirls and layers can be tricky.
3. The Chemistry of Soap Making : Right now, I'll explain to you about the chemistry of soap making, The process of soap making called as Saponification. Soap is a combination of fatty acids, base, and liquid. Or you basically said it as oils and Sodium Hydroxide. The liquid itself is not only just water, but you can also change it, to be tea, milk, and juice. The result of this combination is soap and glycerin. Do you know about glycerin? Glycerin can help to lock your skin's natural moisture and prevent over-drying. Okay. Now, let me tell you about additional materials that you can add in the soap making. First, I want to ask you something. What things become your priority when buying a soap? What are the things that come to your mind when you hear that question? For me, For me, it's about color, scent, texture, and accessories. You can add some natural colors like moringa powder, alkanet powder, arrowroot powder, and another powder. Or you can use mica powder too for coloring your soap. By using the color, you can explore your creativity by making soap layers or swirl, or any other technic until you get your own design. The next one, the scent, you can add essential oil or fragrance to your soap. But, I suggest you to use essential oil because this oil is 100% pure from herbs, flowers, and plants. Although, this oil is more expensive. it can give you some benefit to your skin. Please note, You still need to calculate the proper amount of essential oil that you can add to your soap. So it will be safe in your skin. The next one is texture. You can add the unique texture to your soap, by adding material like a loofah, coffee grounds and any other additional material. For several texture, it can exfoliate the body, especially dry areas like feet and elbows. Okay, the last one is the accessories. For some soap makers, they love to add dried flowers or toys, or coffee-ground on the top of the soap, and maybe the other ideas to beautifying their soap creation.
4. Get to Know Your Soap Oil Ingredients: At first, I really confused about oils that used for soap making because in this world has a lot of variance of oils with different properties and functions too. If I randomly pick and use the oils in my recipe, I will waste my time and money if the recipe is failed. Because of that, I started to learn more about the oils. Now I really want to share the knowledge with you. Hopefully, you can gain some information through this video. Oils can be categorized as hard oil, soft oil, and brittle oil. Hard oil are fats, oils and butter that are solid at room temperature. Palm oil, coconut oil, lard, and shea butter are types of hard oil. This oil will harden the soap, and that's why make the soap easy to unmold. The next one is soft oils. Soft Oils are oils that are liquid at room temperature. They are olive oil, castor oil, sweet almonds, and many more. If your soap contains more soft oil than the hard oil, your soap will have a softer side, except if you use olive oil. You can use 100% olive oil in your soap. And yup! It will be soft at first when you un-molding it, but the soap will be harder after the curing process complete. Okay. The last one is brittle oil. They are oils that solid at room temperature, but require some chipping at or a bit of elbow grease to break them up. Cocoa butter is one of these types of oil. Brittle oils will harden the soap too. Now I'll show you several website that can help you to know better about the characteristic of the oils. This is one of the website and I always use as a reference for my recipe. Here you can know about each oil categorize, oil properties, the recommended usage in every soap, and some trick of each oil too. So, what is the recommended usage? This is the maximum percentage usage for your recipe. If you add the ingredients past the maximum limit, your soap maybe would have an undesired result, either from the odor, bubble, appearance, and the other one. You can still use it, but it may not be a perfect soap. For example, I want to make a soap with coconut oil, olive oil, castor oil, and cocoa butter. Then, how much I can use for soap? From there, I will look up this website and start to write down the percentage. Here, we can see the percentage of the coconut oil is between 15- 50%, olive oil 100%, castor oil 5- 10%, and cocoa butter 5- 15% So in my recipe, I will use 50% of coconut oil, 30% of olive oil, 5% of castor oil, and 15% of cocoa butter. Here another website that can be your reference, the author trying to make soap just using one single oil. From that experiment, you will know how it turns out and give some inspiration to you for choosing the oil. It also shows about chemical composition and other information which can help you to understand the experiment. I will put those links and other related links on my class resources.
5. How to Use Soap Calculator?: Hi again. Now I will explain to you, about the calculation of your soap. Here you can see a soap calculator that I am always using. You can access it through google by type "SoapCalc" on the search query. I guess maybe you feel so confused about everything that you see in this calculator at first. But hopefully through this class, you can understand and able to create your own recipe. First, before we explore the calculator, I will explain to you the basic of each part of the calculator. As you can see here, it contains eight steps to get your recipe result. You need to fill in all of the data. The first section are the Type of lye, it divided into Sodium hydroxide and Potassium hydroxide. If you want to make a soap bar, you must tick the Sodium hydroxide, but if you make liquid soap, you must tick the Potassium hydroxide. Okay, the second section is Weight of Oils, you can choose between pounds, ounces, or grams. You can choose any units which you comfortable with. Here, I will use grams. And the question is, how to determine your weight of oils? You can measure it through the mold that you want to use. If you use a box-shape mold, you need to measure the length, width, and height of the mold. Please measure it from the inside, not from the outside, because you filling the soap from the inside of the mold, right? For example, in this mold, it has 26 cm long, 7 cm wide, and 7.9 cm deep. But, instead of use 7.9 depth, I would calculate it at 6.6cm deep because you won't make your soap completely overflowing and completely filling the mold. Especially if you want to shape the top of your soap. Okay, so, the volume is 1201.2 ml. Now, you get the total soap mold capacity, to get your oil batch size, you need to multiply it by 0.7. So, your weight of oils is 840.84 ml or I can say it as 840 ml for making it easy to measure. Oh, 1 ml of water weighs 1 gram. So, this mold holds 840 grams of soap. Okay, how about if you are using irregular mold shape? You can measure it through your scale. In this mold have 15 small molds. Fill a mold with the water until it reaches out the height level that you want, then leave it. Take your empty container and put it on your scale, and click "on", so it is shown as zero grams with the container on it. After that, pour the water from the mold to the container. Then, the scale will show you the soap mold capacity. You can multiply it by 15 to get the total soap mold capacity. Don't forget to multiply it by 0.7 for calculating your total weight of oils. Okay, the next section is water. It contains three option but I'm always using the lye concentration because it is pretty easy to set up. Lye concentration is a proportion between lye and water. Water is used to dissolve the sodium hydroxide lye, so it can interact with the soaping oils to begin the saponification process. If your solution contains too much lye and not enough water, the soap mixture will be extremely hot and dangerous. So, the highest ratio is 50% of lye and 50% of water. But, this ratio actually still too difficult to work with. That's why I don't recommend it. I suggest you to use between medium water and high water. I generally use about 29% lye concentration on my recipe. Okay, next, what is super fat? Super fat is the amount of extra oils leftover in the soap which adds extra moisturizing qualities to the soap. The other important function is to eliminate the risk of your soap being caustic. What is that mean? Firstly, you must know about the saponification value or we can call it as SAP Value. SAP Value is the amount of lye needed to completely neutralize them into the soap with no lye left over. Each oil will have a different SAP Value. Even the same oils with a different brand will have different SAP values too. Basically, we don't know the exact amount of our oils SAP Value, except, you call the oils manufacturers to ask about it, and then you can manually calculate your recipe. SAP values on the calculator are averages, the oils SAP values vary slightly in their true SAP. Superfatting gives safety in your recipe It makes the soap contains little extra oil and assures that every drop of oils finds every drop of lye (the caustic alkali) then the soap should have no caustic alkali left. But, if your soap has too much "free" oils, it can cause your soap to become spoilage and create DOS or Dreaded Orange Spots. It's when your soap will have some small orange spot and will develop an unpleasant odor. So, in my recommendation, please set your super fat between 5 - 7% in your recipe. Secondly is fragrance. A good amount of fragrance is about 2- 3% of the total oil amounts. Too much fragrance can irritate and give another problem to your skin. Every essential oil has different maximum amounts to use, so you need to check it first before using it in your soap. You can combine 2 or more essential oil to get your desire scent. I will give you, one of the references that help me to know each essential oil usage percentage. Oh, if you don't want to put any scent into your soap, you can set it into 0%. Now, in the step five, you can put all of the oils that you needed. Here, you can see each oil's quality and fatty acids. I will explain more about fatty acids later in the next topic. Now, we can select the oils and click the "Add" button. You must set each oil percentage and make sure everything will have 100% in total. I prefer to use a percentage in this calculator because it is easier to use than using the pound units. After you get 100% in total, click the "Calculate Recipe". Now, lastly, click "view or print recipe". A new tab will appear and show you the measurement of a complete material that you can use.
6. What're Fatty Acids?: As my promise, I would explain more about fatty acids in this class topic. Every oil is a triglyceride which is a combination of fatty acids and glycerol. Fatty acids are divided into two types, saturated fats and unsaturated fat. In saturated fatty acid, the fat will solidify at room temperature. The soap which has these fatty acids will have cleansing properties and will result in a harder and high lather. Fatty acids which include in these types are Myristic, Lauric, Palmitic, and Stearic And how about unsaturated fatty acids? In unsaturated fatty acids, the fat will liquid at room temperature. The soap which has this fatty acids will having a softer finished. . Fatty acids which include in these types are Ricinoleic, Oleic, Linoleic, and Linolenic. Here is a picture that I capture from the Soapcalc website. In this area, it shows the amount of each fatty acid of the oils. Soap has eight types of fatty acids, Lauric, Myristic, Palmitic, Stearic, Ricinoleic, Oleic, Linoleic, and Linolenic. Every oil will have different amount of fatty acids. Okay, now I will show you my summary about these all fatty acids. All of the fatty acids are included in the saturated type. As you can see here, Lauric acids and Myristic acids have the same function, They will escalate the hardness and cleansing properties of soap and will produce fluffy lather. But, If your soap has a lot of Lauric acids, it will make your soap overdried. Palmitic acids will give hardness too to the soap, It also adds creaminess and stabilizes soap lather. The great thing about these acids is, it can extend the soap shelf life. Same as Palmitic, Stearic also gives hardness, stable and creamy lather to the soap. Now, let’s move to another fatty acid. In this list, all the fatty acids are unsaturated fat, and have an ability to conditioning the skin. Ricinoleic also resulted in a soap with a stable and creamy lather. These fatty acids can faster the tracing process, unlike in Oleic acids. But, Oleic acids have a great function, they have an ability to extend the soap shelf life, contrary to Linoleic acids if being overused.
7. Step by Step of Soap Making : Yes! This is the time! Let's make your soap! In this class, I will focus on the Cold Process method, my favorite methods. Okay, I will break down the soap making steps into 7 steps. First is preparation, is the step when you must prepare your tools and safety gear to protect you from the harmful substances. Second is calculation and measurement. After selecting your oils, you will need to calculate every ingredient to your soap. Third is mixing, is this step when you start to mix your ingredient and blend it. Fourth is saponification, the chemical reaction that occurs when fats or oils, or you can call it as fatty acids, come into contact with lye, a base. This happened generally takes about 24 to 48 hours to complete. Fifth is unmolding and cutting. Sixth, curing. This process will take about one month or more depend on the soap ingredients. And lastly is storing your soap. Okay, let's begin now.
8. Prepare Your Safety Gear: Do you know, why you must always using safety gear when making cold process methods? Yep, it's because you use lye or Sodium hydroxide in your soap. The substance is corrosive, so it will be dangerous if you are not using the safety gear. But, don't be afraid with lye, as soon as you using your protection gear, everything gonna be okay. So these are the safety gear that you must have Gloves, Safety Goggles, and mask Now, let's prepare your soap making tools. Hand Blender, Easy Pour Containers Silicone Tool Set and Whisks Digital scale, spoon, molds Soap Cutter Thermometer and PH Strips
9. Measure and Calculate Your Soap Ingredients: First, you must decide what kind of soap you want to make. Is this soap for dry skin? Or can it be used as exfoliating? By knowing your soap properties, you will be able to decide your soap ingredients easily. You can read about each ingredient's function and determine the percentage of every ingredient. For example, I will make soap for oily skin. The soap must be very cleansing, Also, it can moisturize at the same time too. If It lacks moisturizing properties, the soap will be too drying for the skin. Now, I must determine the total oil weight, super fat, and lye concentration for the recipe. As I said in the previous topic, you can measure your total needed oil weight through your mold. For this class, I will use my silicon mold, which has an irregular shape. To calculate the total weight of oils, first, pour water only into a small-molds. For the remaining water in this container, I will pour it back into the bottle. Take the container and put it on the scale, and click "on". so it is shown as zero grams. Now, pour the water from the mold into the container. Okay, so, in the one mold can hold 73 gram of water. Because I want to use all of the molds, so I will multiply it by six. The result is 438 grams. To get my total weight of oils, I must multiply it by 0.7. So, in this mold, have a total weight of oils at 306.6 grams or I can say it as 306 grams. I will use 5% for the superfat because I want this soap doesn't contain too many left oil and can be dried up a bit faster. For the ingredient, I will use 40% of Coconut Oil, 15% of canola oil, 5% of castor oil, 10% of cocoa butter, and 30% of olive oil. And then, I will add activated charcoal powder and 2% of tea tree essential oil into my soap. After I know the percentage of each oil and the other data. I can input all of the data into the soap calculator. You can set the fragrance to zero if you confused to determine the exact number. Because in this calculator you must change the units into gram per kilograms. You can calculate the fragrance manually by multiply your desired essential oil percentage with the total weight of oils. After you click the "Calculate recipe" button, you can see the totals of oil in here, same with the totals oil that you input before. Yes! Now, we already get the recipe. From this recipe, we can know the exact weight of every ingredient and only needs to follow it. Super easy, right? Next, I measure my olive oil, coconut oil, cocoa butter, castor oil, and canola oil. I put them all in different containers. Then, I prepare the tea tree oil and charcoal powder too. After that, I will weigh the lye and water. Please make sure to use only distilled water into your soap, so you won't accidentally add anything that could cause any problem to your soap. Don't forget to use your gloves, mask, and safety goggles when dealing with lye. Do not change the amount of the ingredients by adding it or reduce it because it maybe can causing undesired results. make sure to use a dry container for the lye.
10. Let's Create Our Soap!: All right, everything is ready now! Let's mixing and create your soap! But, wait! Don't mix it randomly because it can cause a caustic volcano and harmful gasses. First, add the lye to the liquid and not the other way around. Remember, never put liquid to the lye. Then, mix and stir them using a spoon until it fully dissolved and set in a safe place, out of reach of children and pets. This mixture can heat up to over 200 degrees F really quickly. You must wait until it cools to about 90 to 115 degrees Fahrenheit. Oh, please make sure, when you mixing this, do it in a good- ventilation room or in the outside because the gases from this lye solution won't be good for your health in the long term. You can add ice cubes outside the lye container to cool it faster. While waiting for the lye solution cooler, I will melt the cocoa butter using a crockpot before I mix it with the other oils. Anyway, waiting for the cocoa oils to fully melted will takes your time. So, you can shorten it by keep stirring the cocoa butter as soon as your crockpot is heating up. Now, as you can see, the cocoa butter is already melted. I will pour the other oil into the crockpot and mix them all. Let's wait until the combined oils reach 90 to 115 degrees Fahrenheit You can check the temperature of the oils and lye solution to make sure They already reach 90 to 115 degrees Farenheit. Pour the combined oil into the lye solution. In this mixing, you can do that in reverse. From now, you need to mix it using a hand blender. Blend the soap in short bursts of a few seconds at a time. Sometimes, you must stir by hand with the motor off. Don’t run the hand blender continuously or you may burn out the motor and your soap will thicken up too quickly. Because in this recipe I am using essential oil and colorant, I will add them as soon as the soap reaches a light trace, it is a condition when the soap color changes a bit and still watery. After adding it, I am blending the soap again until it blends well and the soap feels lumpy. And now you can pour your soap into the molds. dd accessories to the top of your soap if you want to. By using your spatula, you can take the remaining soap from your containers. Then, shaking your soap mold for several times, so that there's no free space between your soap and your soap will be solid. Now, you can put your mold in a safe place and let it do the saponification process for 1 until 2 days. You can put the mold in the fridge or in the dry room too. It depends on the ingredients which you are using in the soap. If your soap contains a lot of sugar ingredients like honey, milk, or juice, your soap has a possibility to overheating and has a higher chance to get volcano soap or cracked. So, you need to put it in the fridge for 1- 2 days. But, I can't guarantee you if your soap won't get a soap volcano, so please prepare and learn more about your recipe and the ingredients that you use. If you are never making a soap beforehand or still a beginner, I recommend you to use a simple recipe first which means do not use any sugar content in your ingredients, except you are already familiar with it or have the knowledge to produce it. Okay, for the additional information, I recommend you to clean up every piece of your equipment with soap remaining on it, a day after your soap making process. Because it will be easy to clean up and doesn't itch your skin.
11. Storing and pH Testing Your Soap: After the saponification process is done, you can unmold the soap and cut it using a soap cutter. In my suggestion, don't cut it in rush because the soap is still soft, it's pretty easy to deform in this step. I have three kinds of soap cutter. First is a straight soap cutter, You can use it to get a straight clean cut soap. The second is a wavy soap cutter. With it, your soap will have a wavy shape on the side. The last one is the wire soap cutter. This is the best soap cutter that I have. Even, it will give the same look as the straight soap cutter, but every soap will have the same size because this type of cutter has a gap which helps you to cut in the same size precisely. Now, you can store your soap for 1 month and more in a dry and good ventilation place. A room with a lot of airflows is preferable. For your information, The length of the curing process is different depends on the ingredients that you put in your soap. If you use 100% olive oil, you need a year for it to completely finish it curing time. Okay, let's be back on the topic. Please don't cover or wrap your soap with plastics or anything else until it dries completely. Even if you are living in a damp environment, don't put your soap inside the box or drawer despite the fact you use a dehumidifier because it can cause your soap spoilage. Keep putting your soap in the open-air environment. When storing your soap in the first month, you can put it in the plastic or metal rack. Please make sure, to give a distance between every soap, so each bar soap has a good airflow around it. Oh, if you have a metal rack with a plastic coating, it would be a great idea because it can avoid rust appear in the rack. After your soaps are completely dry and finish their curing process, you can store it inside the box or drawers. Dehumidifiers or silica gel can help your soap to keep dry on the box. Please, give a small gap between each soap, you can stack the soap too so you can use your storage space effectively. The other reason why you need to store it in a closed place is to prevent your soap from getting covered with dust and to keep your soap's scent not fade away. Well, after the saponification process completed, you can check the alkalinity or the acidity of your soap. PH strip has a range between 0 to 14. On the pH scale, less than 7 is acidic, 7 is neutral, and above 7 is alkaline. For the handmade soap, the range always between 8-9, if your soap greater than 10 that means that soap is lye-heavy and can irritate or burn the skin. For your information, the pH can lower further during the four until six weeks of curing. Okay, this is our last session of this class. Hopefully, this class can help you to create your own soap. Please, share with me too your soap creation. I would be so happy to see them. If you have questions, please inform me. Thank you so much for your participation. Have a good day.
The Dots Meal, Soap Maker and Designer
