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I have made many, many fragrance- and color-free soaps because my daughter has one of the worst cases of eczema you could ever imagine. I started making "natural" soaps for that reason, but I'm beginning to believe that many essential oils and all fragrance oils cause her to flare up to the...

Funny, I just made my first salt bar 5 days ago. Coconut Oil: 893 g Mango Seed Butter: 119 g Olive Oil (pomace): 119 g Castor Oil: 60 g Water: 393 g (33% wgt of oils) NaOH: 167 g Sugar in the lye water: two heaping "table" spoons (like a serving spoon, not a measuring spoon) Salt: 2 lbs, 10...

The last I read (before today) was the counter-argument from Tisserand about the flawed 2007 anecdotal evidence from 3 boys (https://naha.org/naha-blog/neither-lavender-oil-nor-tea-tree-oil-can-be-linked-to-breast-growth-in-you). I have to be a little wary of the new Eurekalert release as it...

I figure we'll use it. Even though there are piles of soap in what my wife calls "the man cave" (soap and herbal medicine room), we run through it really fast. There are often 8-10 bars of soap in the shower that is used by three of us, plus my shampoo bar, and all but the shampoo bar seem to...

Sorry if this has been covered, but I searched all topics on Superfat and couldn't find this particular question. (Cue person finding 6 identical topics I couldn't see) I've made about 60 batches of CP soap now, small batches are 3 pounds, large are upwards of 9. My superfat rate can be...

Doesn't Gale say that you can get by without physical address and phone number as long as your email address or web site (which would be on the product) is in a couple of online directories? I know I read that, but I don't know if it was on her website addenda or if it was in the original book.

About that hardware thing... "board feet" is a totally different measurement than just plain old feet, the length measurement. Because lumber yards (in this case, the 'yard' is the physical grounds, not a unit of measure) originally calculated everything based on the pre-trimmed size of the...

Hello fellow Carolinian (because we all know that "Carolina" in this state refers to a school in Columbia and has nothing to do with North Carolina). I wish you success with liquid soaps, as that's something I have not even come close to having the courage to attempt, but I do make plenty of...

I don't drink coffee, but I like the smell and since of the 50 or so batches I've made over the past 18 months only two have scents that actually stay on my skin post shower, I think I'd be safe making a coffee-scented bar. It would be refreshing in the shower and then after that, like...

My preferred mold is the kitty litter box. I can make 5-9 pound batches, depending on how thick I want them to be, and then cut them into 2 by 2.5 inch bars or thereabouts. If I use the loaf mold, I get these gigantic four-ounce bars that are always too big for my wife's hands and even a bit...

I used them a lot before I purchased a loaf mold (already used a cat litter box, too). I think my favorite soaps have come from the milk carton molds and I don't mind the bowing out. They can certainly gel (and even volcano!). I think I'll go back to them because I don't like the size of the...

Doesn't seem very practical. The ad blurb says that after "years" of making and selling, they'd sold 29,000 bars of soap. While that sounds significant, it's not going to be a viable 'business' (as they are pushing their kit to be). A good hobby money stream, but not a business.

I, too, love NDA and I'm in the States. Even shipping from Canada, their freight charge always seems to be far better than any of the Western US outfits--by a lot.

Excellent games, both. Whenever I go to a game convention, those are two games we must play. In fact, when Telestrations just came out, I took it to a boardgame convention and others played it to death so much that they bought me new markers and a dozen or more people ordered it from Amazon...

Mine is simple. My name and where I live. I came up with it in the early AOL days, when I never would have dreamed of having to type @domain.com after a user name and certainly not on a playing-card sized gadget. My kids, who have been drilled in school with the internet secrecy mantra think...

I enjoyed the original series of Star Trek, back when it was still on TV. Not so much the later stuff or any other Sci-Fi. I played D&D, but that was back in the late 1970s and about three times in the late 80s. I watched Baker Dr. Who which was always on our local PBS station, but that dried...

I use about 10 beans for a mason jar of vodka. Then, after several weeks, I keep the beans and add about six more (cutting the old ones in half to distinguish them). I do this another time so that I end up with 1/4 length, 1/2 length, and full length beans in the mixture. I ended up with a...

I have made several soaps with a beer base (mostly shampoo bars, but some others) and I've never used any water at all. I do always flatten it by boiling it for a short while and then just leaving it on the stove top to cool overnight. Then I pour it into a container and put it in the fridge...

As has been mentioned, infusing your oil(s) with a botanical and then straining the solids out will give you nice colored oils. Likewise, when I don't want grainy and gritty botanicals in my soap, I will put the botanical in my lye solution when I mix it up. Then, as I add the lye to the oils...

My recipe (been using it over a year now) is: 25% Coconut 20% Castor 20% Olive 10% Canola 10% Palm 10% Avocado 5% Jojoba SF = 5% Lye concentration 30% I use beer as the base liquid rather than water and usually crack a couple of egg yolks into it along with a couple tablespoonfuls of...