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Hi - recently I posted about castor oil and soda ash as I had made some soap without castor oil and it hadn't ashed for a change! Background - I always refrigerated my soap and never had problems with ash until I certified a recipe for sale and now have constant ash problems as well as crumbly...

I have been having a helluva time with soda ash on a certified recipe (I am in UK). I have tried CPOPing which is mostly successful but does rather spoil the colours of a couple of my soaps as I use natural colours. Ash has only been a problem on about 4 of my 9 regular recipes. The base...

I find mixing silk into lye takes ages however small I cut it, and I always need to push the resulting goo through a sieve to ensure I don't get bits of undissolved (and possibly lye rich) silk in my soaps. I was making my lavender and tussah silk soap today and swearing at the unmixable silk...

I have had my soaps certified and one of the rules seems to be that you have to print off and attach all of the MSDS sheets for all of the ingredients to your certification document. I have to admit I haven't got around to this yet, partly because I can't believe it. I have over 30...

I don't understand the food thing either. Some shops sell soaps that look exactly like cup cakes or even whole cakes that you cut slices out complete with "whipped cream" and "cherries"and all! Dead groovy - yes, the info provided by your certifier looks like standard stuff and is how I do my...

Hi, I recently posted a thread about soaping in a heatwave and before that "cocoa butter bloom" in soap. In both threads we got talking about soda ash and whether that was the strange thing that was happening to my soap. I said I would try making without deionised water, as that was the only...

Hi I live in England and, unusually for the time of year, we are routinely seeing temperatures around 30 degrees C. I need to make some soap in time for a charity Open Day in the Middle of September. I was going to start now and make over the next two weeks, but the weather is not expected to...

I have just been making a batch of soap for sale and most of the bars seem to have varying degrees of problems with a whitish bloom on the surface and some have whitish, slightly crumbly edges. The surface bloom seems to come off with a damp cloth and the crumbliness does not go more than a mm...

I thought I'd share a recent experience I had with my honey, oatmeal and cinnamon soap. I've made this soap, or variations of it, several times and always worried about putting the honey in at trace in case it didn't mix in evenly. So I was pleased to discover a new technique of dissolving the...

Hi all, I just thought I'd share an idea with people. I always have problems with honey soap as I find it hard not to get partial gel and a resulting dark patch in the middle of my soap. I soap cool, pour fast, freeze for about half an hour prior to refrigeration for at least a day and I still...

I am about to sell my first batch of soaps in a couple of weeks time (having got them certified etc) and was just putting the label on one of my basic formula (no colours or perfumes) soap to find a Dreaded Orange Spot! Checking the batch nearly all have these and the soap is only about 5 weeks...

Hi I'm trying to come up with a base recipe to get some soaps EU certified for sale through a charity shop. The charity want palm oil free soap. I have tried variations on 40/45% olive oil, 30/35% coconut oil, and either 20% shea or 10% each shea and cocoa butters with and without caster oil...