A brief visit to Soap Gallery, a specialty soap shop with a small workshop in Sutera Mall, brought about the realization that I now have access to lye, palm oil and other cheap carrier oils. This sparked another attempt at making cold process soap, which I haven’t done since 2 years ago.
With this attempt came purchases such as Pyrex measuring cups for creating an ice bath for the lye solution and base oils that used too be too expensive for a poor student. I even bought a soap stamp! This kind of expense was unthinkable just 2 years ago. To think back then I hesitated to even spend 40 bucks on safer glass containers and used grade 5 plastic containers to mix lye instead! I also only bought only the cheapest kind of base oil in the market (think coconut oil from the Indian mom and pop store) and was very stingy with essential oil usage. The world changes when you have an income.
Recipe VI – Coconut Milk Soap
- Fractionated Coconut Oil 90g
- Palm Oil 90g
- Olive Oil 120g
- Water 64ml
- Coconut Milk 50ml
- Lye 47g
- Lavender Essential Oil ~50 drops
- Spearmint Essential Oil ~20 drops
- Peppermint Essential Oil ~20 drops
Although I entered ‘Fractionated Coconut Oil’ and ‘Palm Oil’ into the lye calculator and applied the above recipe, on hindsight, a more accurate entry would be ’76 Deg Coconut Oil’ and ‘Red Palm Butter’. The Pyrex measuring cups were awesome and the battery operated hand whisk (from Daiso, a steal at 2 SGD) worked like a charm.
Despite the above, the outcome was the strangest I ever got. The vivid orange soap, no doubt colored by unrefined palm, seemed to trace normally and solidified after a couple of hours but even after 2 days, I was unable to unmold the soaps properly because the consistency of the back of the soaps was like soft Plasticine. The bits were left in the mold were so soft that I could shape them into balls. This is weird because Soapcalc tells me this soap will be very hard. I haven’t figured out what went wrong.
The red palm oil also seemed to have permanently colored my silicon mold orange, but this is besides the point.
These misshapen orange soaps are now sitting on my curing rack in my closet, which is now filled with the wonderful scent of lavender/spearmint/peppermint. Let’s see if it manages to harden after a couple of months.
茉莉花の独り言 