W I had some left over violet mica from a previous project and I thought I'd put that in. I think it made it ever an ever so slightly darker yellow so sufficed to say, that idea didn't work. I will have to wait until I get an order of mica delivered before I next try to colour something. Which is a pity because Friday is a public holiday and I was hoping to do something then. It is unlikely to arrive tomorrow. I forgot to add.... whatever it is you add to make it harder when you are using a silicon mould. I forget what it is called. Oh well.
We'll see how it turns out tomorrow and after it cures.
Jayne, congratulations on your first soap! Sodium Lactate. But you don't have to wait for your order to come in. You can just add salt to harden your bar quicker. Here's how:
https://www.thespruce.com/make-soap-harder-faster-517222
As for colorants you can use while you wait for your CP stable mica order, look in your pantry. You can get a deeper sort of orangish/yellow (depending on how much you use) with turmeric. Infuse in a bit of oil from your recipe and strain out the tiny particles to avoid spots in your soap. Also a capsule of beta carotene (dietary supplement sold with the vitamins in pharmacies) will produce a deep orange. You snip the capsule and squeeze the oil into your soap, carefully as it will stain everything it touches. If you have chlorphyll liquid (another dietary supplement some people have, but not the most common ingredient in most people's refrigerators) you can use it to color your soap green. Most organics in your kitchen or from your garden don't work well for coloring soap as the lye eats them up and turns them brown, but calendula flower petals hold up well and again, produce a deep yellow to orange color.
As Shari said, some micas don't survive lye. Don't waste your time trying to use the micas from eye shadow (I tried that once) because if it's not lye resistant, it will morph or totally disappear. I tried it once and although it was a fun experiment, there was no resulting color in the soap.
For very light color, in SOME cases, food coloring does work, in others it doesn't. I colored lye soap with food coloring once a couple of years ago and it stuck for the life of the soap, which I had for over a year before I used it all up. So you could try that if you have any on hand, just so you can make soap and experiment.
Of course once you get your micas, you will can obtain quite vibrant color schemes and that's really a lot of fun!
Oh, and that temperature difference isn't going to ruin your soap. It should be just fine.
