Making Cold Process Soap with Cedarwood and Orange Oil
In this video I am making natural soap using the cold process. A few months ago I tried out the hot process. To give the soap a black color I use coarse ground activated charcoal. It will have a double use as a scrub. Because I am very happy with how this soap turned out, I decided to do a soap giveaway as soon as my channel, Tony Needs Hobbies, reaches one hundred subscribers. Please follow me along on this journey!
The recipe can be found by clicking this link.
Video transcript:
Hello ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Tony Needs Hobbies. My name is Tony and in this video I will show you how you can make your own soap using the cold process and I will be using these two soap molds that I made in last week’s video. Have fun watching!
Alright, let’s start with a recap from when I made soap using the hot process. The last, and actually the first time when I made soap I used the hot process. I wanted to soap to look masculine by making it black but when I added the soap colorant it flaked and the result is this pale greenish looking bar with some black spots. In this video I will describe the cold process for making soap and to turn it black I suspended some activated charcoal in olive oil because I read online that this should do the job. Fingers crossed…
The main ingredients for this batch of soap are 16% coconut oil, 40% olive oil, 44% beef tallow, water and sodium hydroxide to make the lye solution and cedarwood oil as well as orange oil. The materials that I use are these two soap molds that I made in last week’s video. They hold up to 3 kilograms of soap. I will use this stick blender, this thermometer, a stainless steel pot and this spoon. As a safety precaution these materials will only be used for making soap. It’s really important to work safe. Lye is a caustic and dangerous solution so be sure to wear safety glasses, safety gloves, long sleeves and long trousers.
It all starts with weighing the ingredients. With respect to last time I’m using an improved recipe that is better balanced between different types of oils. I made the recipes with the soap calculator. You can download it from my website which is linked down below. The first ingredient is water. After measuring the right amount of water I will add sodium hydroxide to it. Don’t do it the other way around. It will get too hot and you might risk that the lye solution starts splashing around, which is very unsafe. It will still get very hot so be very careful. After adding sodium hydroxide to the water and mixing it I set the lye aside outside so that it can cool down to around 50 degrees Celsius. During this period I weigh the other ingredients and heat them up a bit so that the temperature of the liquefied oils matches the temperature of the lye within a range of a few degrees.
Wen both liquids are within the same temperature range the lye can be added to the oils. As soon as the lye gets into contact with the oils you can see the saponification reaction start. The mixture gets cloudy and after a while it becomes opaque. That is the moment to start blending with the stick blender. Start with short pulses but as the liquid becomes thicker use longer pulses. After a few minutes the soap reaches the so called trace state which is indicated by the mixture leaving a trace when you move the stick blender through it. This is when I will stop blending and add the essential oils, cedar wood and orange oil, and give the mixture one last stir before pouring it into the molds.
The molds are prepared by lining them with parchment paper. I measure 1500 grams of soap in a beaker so all the bars will have the same dimensions. Then I carefully pour the soap in the mold. The second mold will be filled with a colored soap mixture. To color it black I suspend coarse ground activated charcoal in a little bit of olive oil. This will act both as a colorant and as a scrub. After thoroughly mixing, this will be poured in the second mold. Then both molds are covered with a piece of parchment paper and the wooden lid.
After approximately 24 hours the soap has solidified enough to be cut after taking it out of the molds and parchment paper. Where hot process soap is immediately ready to use, these cold process soap bars need to cure for six to eight weeks after cutting and they have to be turned upside down regularly so that both sides dry evenly.
I made 22 bars of soap and they look and smell just great. In contradiction to last time when I tried to make black soap this time the black soap actually turned out to be black so I’m really happy with that. I’m so happy that I decided that I will give some of the soap away when this channel reaches 100 subscribers so if you don’t want to miss the update about the soap giveaway be sure to subscribe to my channel and if you have liked this video hit the like button down below. For now I would like to thank you for watching. Bye, bye!
