Hi folks! How do I speed up trace in olive oil soap?

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Yes, the English name is "heat pump" for a machine that heats or cools air. Most air conditioners only cool.
 
Yes, the English name is "heat pump" for a machine that heats or cools air. Most air conditioners only cool.

In Australia we call it a reverse cycle air conditioner. A heat pump is something different here in Australia. :)

You are better off making a fragrance free soap than using a non skin safe FO. The skin does absorb stuff especially in the heat of the shower.
 
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There are a lot of things you can use for natural colorants. Some color well and stick, while more of them fade over time. I haven't used them all, so am no expert. If you do a browser search for 'natural colorants soap making' you'll get a lot of results. It may be easier for you to do the search in your own language (Danish?) so the results are easier to read and understand. But here are a couple I have used in the past:

http://www.lovinsoap.com/2011/07/natural-soap-colorants-gallery-spice-and-herbal-powders-at-trace/

http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art50548.asp

http://www.modernsoapmaking.com/join-jo-coloring-soap-naturally/

http://www.diynatural.com/natural-soap-colorants/

And one on the not totally natural colorants:

https://www.soapqueen.com/bath-and-body-tutorials/tips-and-tricks/talk-it-out-tuesday-colorants/

Re: a heater/cooling device with a fan, here they can be called a few different things. A 'heating cooling fan' is one thing they are called. Some manufacturers call them 'air circulator'. I've seen them advertised a lot of ways. I have one that looks like this and it's advertised as an 'oscillating fan', which blows cool or heated air as well as moving side to side while blowing the treated air.

Z
ja584re
 
I should have mentioned that you can find many threads there on SMF about natural colorants. Just use the search box at the top of the forum page. You can either type your search parameters into the white box next to the word 'Search', and click on the word 'Go', or you can do an advanced search using the 'down arrow' directly to the right of the word 'Search' and before the white box. This gives you a drop down box that looks like this:

SMF%20Search%20001.jpg


In the advanced search there are several options to narrow your search. You can search thread titles only, or

SMF%20Advanced%20Search%20001.jpg


even entire threads by changing the option in the drop-down box in the 'search by keyword' area.

SMF%20Advanced%20Search%20002.jpg
 
Yes, it's maybe not skin safe at all. But I thought if it was safe enough to inhale, it would be somewhat not too bad for a soap you will wash off. And it was an emergency solution, since I had no fragrances or essential oils.

I would not use that soap on my skin. Just because it can be used to freshen a room doesn't mean it is safe for the skin. They are not made to be used on the skin diluted or not. Since it's only for your use it's totally up to you and if you choose to possibly cause an adverse reaction.

I would not recommend making anymore soap unless you plan on making it unscented until you can find skin safe EO's or FO's.

I don't mean to sound harsh but it's really not safe to do.
 
An example of a scent that is safe to inhale but bad for the skin would be bergamot or lime essential oil. These EOs will cause a chemical burn if you put them on your skin and expose that skin to sunlight. But they're both reasonably safe to inhale. I'm just sharing this to help you understand Shari's point.
 
You learn something new everyday. English is not my mother language, too. And I was thinking about the Honeywell brand machine or other generics they put in the buildings, hospitals, hotels, offices. The thing you can control heat and also make it cooler. Maybe there's other name for it. ;)


As for the easily available natural colorant, maybe algae or seaweed? But too much of these two smells like dead fish. ( never tried it, saw it on here) the blue, red and yellow...maybe try order ultramarine online? There's a recent thread named something ultramarine blue and it's very beautiful blue shades. You can add titanium dioxide to make lighter, so you got different shades of blue. Tomato purée / ketchup make red, depending how much you put it. But food additives can not be put too much, or it will grow mold. Calendula infused oil can be the yellow. And it's one of the few natural things won't turn brown in soap. ( cornflower, too ) lavender bud will turn brown, will look like mouse droppings. Rose petal will, too. Unless you stick the flower on top of the soap.
Other options are mica ( very colorful, won't bleed color out) , oxides ( never tried it. Try search it on forum) LAKES ( food grade LAKES can bleed color, some are NOT skin safe but food safe. Weird, huh?! ) ultramarine blue

Moss... I don't know will it be green or brown. Maybe search it on forum? There's a fun thing called lichen. I think might grow in your weather. Some lichen is used in perfume industry and is a irritant. I don't know how it will smell in soap. :p

www.jimbonham.com/blog/natural-colorants-used-in-soap-making/
He use lichen in soap. It's light pink beige. But other Google search are green. He said depend on type of lichen.
 
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Yup, sorry, Rune. You need to throw that soap away. :(

Another concern of mine would be that the caustic soap batter could have reacted with the fragrance and produced some kind of toxic, unsafe byproduct.
 
But anyway. I want to make some more soap, not today but maybe tomorrow, and will be very glad if someone know of a trick to get olive oil soap to come to a thick trace, without a stick blender?

Assuming your fragrance oil is docile, as that one appears to be, a few accelerants you could try are a dribble of clove oil or a few percentage points of a free fatty acid such as stearic if you can get it.
 
Maybe rune will be able to use it. He said it's 50 drops. I guess it's cinnamon & vanilla in total 50 drops. Compare to the soaps, it's really a smidgen even if it's not skin safe. :p
 
Thank you all for all the replies. I will now go thru all the links about natural colorants and so on.

This fragrance oil I used, the cinnamon, it's not skin safe, the bottle says. So I will take a chance and try, but only use it myself. I didn't use very much either. But yes, you are right, it can be toxic. On the other hand, there is nothing you normally would find in soaps, like all the toxic chemicals they add, parabenes and so on. So maybe it will not be worse than a commercial soap after all. The vanilla I used is an essence for food. So it's just vanillin. That one is safe, but not the cinnamon fragrance oil.

I have been watching a lot of Youtube videos, and especially those from Hila in Israel (Hila All Natural Soaps). She uses only naturals, and I really like how they look. I got some essential oils from England. And I can use a little of them to fragrance soaps as well. The patchouli is really, really strong, so I don't need to use the whole bottle, not at all. And the bottle of Atlas Cedarwood, that one can go in soaps as well. If i find something to combine it with. I didn't like the scent, you see, so I will not use it as a perfume or in a perfume blend. Rosewood, that was a wow experience. I can not waste a drop of that precious oil, since I will perfume myself with it. But I can order a bigger bottle and use it in soap making.

If only summer could come soon. But it will not happen before end of May, or maybe later. I am above the Arctic Circle, so it's not a southern climate. But, when spring and summer eventually comes, we have a ton of thing popping up from the ground. Flowers of all sorts and uncountable green plants. Many plants are poisonous, and some really lethal, so I can't just pick plants after their scent. I must do research on every single one.

Anyway, I have decided to make only all natural soaps. And I found a norwegian website similar to Etsy, that I can use to sell the soaps. But it will for sure be a lot of trial and error before I can make something I can sell. Other people sell soaps with partial gel and wrong ingredients listed, or said to be all natural when it's not, I discovered on this norwegian website. I will definately not do that.
 
I have tried a scent combo from a forum member lsg, and it smells good. She posted: sweet orange & cedarwood 1:1 ratio. It's calls emerald island I think. This is some sort of basic blend of man's fragrance. You can find lots of perfume contains these two essential oils. Or if you don't have sweet orange, you can try other citrus EO. See which one you like or which one is cheaper. ( bergamot is more expensive, especially the non-light sensitive one,bergaptene free . Grapefruit also is more expensive)

If you are looking for essential oil blends, try www.mountainroseherbs.com on the site, you can check out each EO and it will list something that blends well with it. And you can choose what EO you have and starts from there. People here taught a trick that use cotton swabs and put a drop of each EO desired and start building your own blends. Put it in a ziplock or plastic bag and a post-it sticker writing down each blend's ratio.
Or try www.fragrantica.com it's a perfume site, you can search your favorite perfume. Cheap or expensive ones. From body shop, lush, drug store perfume to high end $$$$ kind of niche market. And you can study what you can recreate because they got a chart of what portion people smell it first. Of course there will be something synthetic, but the fun is creating something you never thought of. ;)

And good luck to you, finding your favorite recipe, sourcing your reasonable priced local oil supply, find scents you like, and to sell you have to do scents you hate... It's a long way to go. Welcome to the addiction.
 
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Rune - before you leap into selling, you really need to learn more about soap making. You need to learn how to make a safe, consistent product. To be brutally honest - if you are using fragrances not approved for skin use in your soap, you are VERY far from being ready to sell. Yes, it is a small amount - but it is a small amount of something VERY potent. Your soap may be fine to use on your hands - but what if somebody washes their face with it? Their delicate parts? What if somebody with very sensitive skin uses it?

You can add plants to soap if you want - but you won't get any scent that way. And in most cases, you won't get any color other than brown.
 
I use a ratio 1:2 in my water/lye concentration of olive oil soap and it works perfectly. You should also consider that once your soap is made and poured it needs to rest in a warm place (covered with blankets) for at least 24hr as it takes some time to get to a consistency right enough to unmould (that is for a soap which is mostly olive oil). I have been using soap calc as a lye calculator just changing the lye instead of "percentage" using "ratio"
 
Hi, sorry for my late replies again.

I will never ever use any fragrance oil meant for oil burners for product that are meant to be sold. It was just a test batch with what I had on hand, and just for my own use. I will in fact not use any fragrance oils at all, even those for soap making. And I will never pick plants outdoors without doing research on them beforehand, since a lot of them is poisonous or very skin sensitizing.

I found a supplier i Ukraine, and I am about to place an order. The prices are great! But I have too much in the shopping cart, and they have a lot to offer in this shop, so I must strip the cart, otherwise it will be too expensive. I found wooden molds and everything there. The wooden molds are now gone from the shop, so I hope it's just temporarily. And I found a great single wire cutter as well. Plus lots and lots of natural materials and more. The only problem is that the language is russian only. But it does work if you translate the whole link to the shop in Google Translate, and navigate there. And then goes to the shop itself and find the same items, and put it in the cart.

Here is the link to the shop, if someone wish to see what they have. I guess shipping to America and Australia will be way too high, so it will most likely be interesting only for you in Europe, Middle East, North Africa and closer parts of Asia. But here is the link: http://www.easysoap.com.ua

Another link that is great, and does have a huge lot of things, ranging from very cheap to relatively expensive, is Aroma Zone in France. There you have the same problem, the shop is only in french. But Google translate will work there as well. The Ukrainian shop has items from Aroma Zone as well, but it's cheaper to buy those items from Aroma Zone. The link is: http://www.aroma-zone.com

I googled just a couple of minutes ago pomace olive oil. I am looking for a supplier of that in Norway. And I found something really scary! It is an article written in 2007 in the Norwegian financial newspaper, Dagens Næringsliv (Todays Business) about the olive oil industri, particulary in Italy. Oh lord! I must find a way to translate it for you. The article was of course not about olive oil for soap making, but for consume. But it does apply to soap making as well. If the oil you buy is dilluted with all sorts of other oils, it does for sure mess up the recipes. And it also tells that pomace is carcinogenic. I have not read everything yet, but it seems like the worst to buy is extra virgin olive oil. I don't think they have so much interest in cheating with the lower quality of olive oil, since the price is way under extra virgin. But who knows. It may be rapeseed or sunflower, mineral oil?

Okey, I do it like this. Here is the original link to the article: http://www.dn.no/d2/d2mat/2007/11/09/olja-logn

And here is the Google Translate version. Google does a great job, so it's not too bad at all: https://translate.google.com/transl...d2mat/2007/11/09/olja-logn&edit-text=&act=url

If there is something you don't understand, you can just go to the original text and cut and paste it into google, and tweak it a little bit until you get a meaningful sentence.

When you see "FSA", it is really the Norwegian FDA. It is called Mattilsynet in Norwegian. FSA doesn't give any meaning, I guess. If something is unclear, I can translate manually.
 
The olive oil situation has been discussed numerous times her on the site. Fortunately, even adulterated oil soaps pretty much like true olive. Pr you need to find a reputable brand.
 
Aha, okey. That is good to know that the fakes soap as well as the real deal. Reputable brand, yes, maybe for cooking. But I will look primarily on the price tag for oils to use in soaps :)
 
The adulteration of essential oils is also a biiig problem. And the even bigger problem is that many can't afford buying from reputable brands with all sorts of test equipment, but have too look at the prices since you have to use much more of the essential oils for soap than for any other application. And then, the lower the price the more likely it is to be adulterated, maybe. That is a huge problem when trying to make products you can claim is 100% natural.

But what to do? So I have found out that if the essential oil is sold to me as natural, and I have no specific suspicion about the purity of the product, then I will claim my soaps to be 100% natural, when that time comes (I have to make the soaps first and cure them, pack them and market them). And if someone asks about the purity of the essential oils used in the soap, I will just tell them that I can't guarantee that since there is so much that is adulterated. I have heard that 75% of all essential oils are not pure.

But luckily, many of them are adulterated with all natural ingredients. Like mixed with other plants and dilluted with base oils.
 
You are very wrong on the reputable companies. The large majority of us here use top quality EO and FO. And most companies we use have tested them in products and post the results. Remember, you get what you pay for. Use oils from reputable suppliers. If you can't afford the appropriate supplies and ingredients you may want to think about another hobby. I sell and will not use sub par ingredients. You f you are making only for yourself you can do soapmaking fairly inexpensively making small batches. I sell and it took well over a year of testing and formulating. Not a cheap adventure.
 
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