How can I make fast dissolving pieces of bar soap for single use?

[rncchapman]

Hi all!

I'm a bit of a soap making virgin and am currently having a go myself for the first few times!

I am currently doing a project where I need to make small pieces of bar soap that can be dissolved quickly in a single use, no larger than smarties. I wondering if you could take a few minutes to help me with a few questions!

How can I make fast dissolving pieces of bar soap? Current bar soaps in stores are designed to last a long time and small pieces when broken off take a long time to dissolve when used also. How can I speed up the dissolving process whilst washing your hands?

I have made soap with this cold process kit http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B004AMLT0O/?tag=skimlinks_replacement-20 and the same thing has happened, hard soap that takes a long time to dissolve!

How can the contents of the soap be altered to produce fast dissolving, single use pieces of bar soap?

Any light that can be shed on this would be super helpful!

Many Thanks,

Richard

 

[lsg]

You can make single use rose petal soaps by dipping silk rose petals in soap and letting them dry.

http://www.candlesupply.com/how2soappetals.html

 

[new12soap]

I don't know if this would work with CP soap, but start here http://www.soapqueen.com/bath-and-body-tutorials/melt-and-pour-soap/make-like-a-tree-and-leaf-2/

and here http://candleandsoap.about.com/b/2012/03/14/dipped-leaves-flowers-single-use-soaps.htm

the first uses dissolving embed paper, the second uses silk leaves and petals, you wash then throw the petal away.

HTH

 

[rncchapman]

Thanks lsg! However I was hoping to produce slightly thicker pieces of soap, as I was hoping to produce a way to dispense them from a dispenser eventually. So essentially the pieces would be small coin sized, hard to the touch (not overly) yet dissolved quickly when put under water and washed between the hands. Is there any way of doing this? Any more thoughts would really help out!

 

[Genny]

Making the soap smaller would make it dissolve faster. Also, I can't tell what exactly is in the kit you used, but it looks like there are quite a bit of butters. Hard butters & solid oils will make your soap harder. So you'd want to use softer oils. Adding vegetable glycerin to CP soap will make it softer as well and it dissolves easier, too.

The drawback of making a softer soap that dissolves faster is that it will take a lot longer to get hard enough to unmold.

 

[rncchapman]

Hi Genny, the kit I used had shae butter and coconut oil as well as vegetable oil. Do you think If I remove the coconut oil and use less shae butter it could produce some better results for single use fast dissolving pieces? I'm not too fussed about how long it takes to harden as long as we get there eventually!

 

[AlchemyandAshes]

Lots of soft oils may help them dissolve quicker, but also may make them hard to "dispense". Stay away from Palm Oil or Tallow - super hard bars. A little bit of Coconut Oil would help to form them, and as long as you don't use too much (over 20%) it should still dissolve quickly. Grapeseed Oil makes an incredibly soft soap, which would dissolve very quickly, but can also go rancid quickly, so you would want to add some Tocopherols and Rosemary Oleoresin Extract or some other preservative/antioxidant combo to the oil before soaping it to keep it from going rancid. Many of the soft oils have a shorter shelf life, so you would want to do the same with any of them.
If I were you, I would mess around on SoapCalc with some oil combinations, maybe something like Apricot Kernel 75%/Castor 5%/Coconut Oil 20% (I'm just throwing that out there...never soaped that formula), until you get a desired level of hardness (lower) and lather (higher). Warning: It's probably going to be hard to get a soft dissolvable soap with good lather that isn't prone to DOS.

 

[DeeAnna]

...I was hoping to produce slightly thicker pieces of soap

So ... what about this? http://nizzymoulds.com/Planer.htm

--DeeAnna

 

[houseofwool]

What about using a mandolin to make the pieces... Or the slicer side of a box grater.

 

[melstan775]

how small do you want them? If by smarties you literally mean the size of hole-punch, that is way to small to get any kind of lather off of. I've tried with slivers bigger and they still don't work. I would go with the flat idea, something that will fit in the palm of a hand - dipped papers and rose petals, some people even sell julian cut soap and soap peeled in small strips with a peeler for this purpose.

 

[RocknRoll]

So ... what about this? http://nizzymoulds.com/Planer.htm

--DeeAnna

wow, that is swesome... i might have to invest i one of those :shh:

 

[hoegarden]

Now I know what the blade on my soap cutter is for. I have been think why is there a need to put a blade there.

 

[gratia]

I have tried with CP and let me tell you, I had one hell of a time doing this. I soaped to a super thin trace and the soap got hard pretty darn fast. Not pretty!

 

[lizflowers42]

So ... what about this? http://nizzymoulds.com/Planer.htm

--DeeAnna

So many ideas from that website! Wow!

 

[DeeAnna]

So many ideas from that website! Wow!

Yup, I think so too. Nizzy's stuff is pretty neat, and I like how he (I think Nizzy is a he, anyway) designs his molds and other soaper's tools.

I will mention that a woodworker's plane, if you can borrow one from the woodworker in the family, will work nicely as a soap plane, although a woodworker's plane won't have as wide a cutter as Nizzy's soap plane has.

I tried an old fashioned sauerkraut cutter the other day. If it was tuned up properly, I could see how it could work very well. Or a mandoline cutter .... hmmm, so many ideas, so little time! :mrgreen:

 

[ZandarKoad]

I have tried with CP and let me tell you, I had one hell of a time doing this. I soaped to a super thin trace and the soap got hard pretty darn fast. Not pretty!

If you're trying to work with soap that has a long trace time, use extra virgin olive oil. I use around 60% or so, and it takes a full 2 to 3 hours to reach a light trace. If you wait another hour or two, it will probably be just the right consistency for piping, or other applications. You'll have all the time in the world to work with it.

 

[Second Impression]

I wonder if whipped soap would work? I've never made it or used it but from the one tutorial I read, it comes out less dense than CP. It can be piped into any design you want so you could easily meet the dispenser requirement. Otherwise I would vote with the dissolving paper crowd