Today’s post is a foray into one of my hobbies. When I lived in Florida, I experimented for a couple of years with making my own soaps, lotions, and cleaning products. I greatly enjoyed the creative process as well as using what I made. I lost my job and couldn’t keep buying supplies after moving back to Indiana; so I stopped creating. Several times over the last couple of years, Kevin has said to me, “I hope you will pick up soap-making again someday.” …
I finally decided that it was time. Admittedly, something pushed me over the edge. I am allergic to my shampoo. … My organic shampoo. It is hard enough to find a shampoo that doesn’t include sulfates. (Even the organic ones can include laurel sulfate.) It is harder to find one that includes neither sulfates nor coconut. The solution is that I must make my own.
As I began to dig further into my cabinets and identify products I am using that contain sulfates and/or coconut, I realized that I would not just be making shampoo.
My announcement on Facebook that I would be picking up soap-making generated enough interest that I decided to set up a blog category for my soap notes. Of course, since my blog is a place for all things in my life, soap notes will appear at random among other things. If your RSS reader will allow it, you can subscribe to the soapmaking category.
As I have gone over my notes in preparation for my re-entry into soaping, I thought of a few things I wish I had understood at the start.
Vendors: When I started soaping, I got it in mind that I wanted to buy all of my supplies from one vendor. It didn’t work. There are soap supply vendors, and they compete. There are general supply vendors that sell soap supplies–you can even get soap supplies at Hobby Lobby (and I don’t like to do this in general). There are vendors that specialize in herbs and essential oils, and they sell some soaping supplies but won’t be the primary source if you need soap bases or fragrance oils. (See below for discussion of essential oils vs. fragrance oils.) Soaping vendors and herbs/oils vendors sometimes carry different types of containers, and I might go to one and not the other depending on what I’m looking for. Eventually, I found myself desling with four different preferred vendors. In a pinch, I might go and buy a soap mold or container from Hobby Lobby or Amazon, but there are certain things I will absolutely not buy from those kinds of places.
Ingredient types: The most important thing to understand if you are just beginning is the difference between essential oils and fragrance oils. These are terms used in the soap-making and cosmetics field to describe different types of ingredients. Essential oils come from plants and smell like plants (e.g. rose, lavender, jasmine, etc.) They do not have any added chemicals unless they are diluted in a “carrier oil”. A carrier oil is another plant-based oil, generally a nut or vegebale oil, that has little or no scent (e.g. sunflower oil, jojoba oil, etc. These oils are used for other purposes in skin care and soap-making, and many of them can also be used for cooking. Not to be confused with essential oils, fragrance oils are oils made up of synthetic chemicals that are intended to mimic the scent of plants. A synthetic rose fragrance may actually be more attractive to a soap-maker because it has a very strong scent and is extremely cheap (less than $20 for 16 oz as opposed to $150 for 1/8 oz of genuine rose). The “catch” is that the chemicals in synthetic fragrances can cause reactions even for a person who is not sensitive to the plant.
I learned the hard way that it is important to buy essential oils from a vendor that deals specifically with herbs and oils. Perhaps I am an essential oil snob; but I wanted my oils to be strong and to last. The article, How to Buy Essential Oils has some very helpful tips for evaluating vendors. A few they don’t include:
- If the vendor doesn’t say so, ask if the oils are organic. I looked at a site recently that had extremely cheap oils in comparison with my normal vendor, and I noticed that none of them were organic. I wondered why they didn’t carry any organic oils.
- Note whether oils are sold in diluted form. This might seem like a bargain; but it may be more worthwhile to buy your own very small quantity and create your own dilution if you want a quantity of usable oil at low dilution. If a company is selling much oil in diluted form, I tend to wonder about whether their oils have been contaminated in general.
Next post in this category: my observations about the impact of blindness on my craft of soap-making.
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