Using Sea Salt in CP

[Jessa]

I plan on playing around with salts today. Anyone have a suggestion on when I should add it and how much I should add to a 40 oz mold? Will using the salts below result in a similar colored soap or should I use a colorant?

-Red Hawaiian sea salt (non iodized with a bit of purified red clay)
-Black Hawaiian sea salt (solar evaporated sea salt with a bit of activated charcoal)

 

[KiwiMoose]

You'll get a lot of different opinions as to what works well for people. I use 25% of my oils weight as salt, others use 50 or even 100 I believe. I add the salt after I am at medium trace, otherwise it will just sink to the bottom if your mixture is too thin. Have everything ready to go, add your salt, mix it thoroughly and pour.
I don't know that the colours will hold - so if you want them to I would add a bit of additional (red clay or charcoal, or just mica or something).
I usually put salt bars into cavity moulds as they harden quickly and are hard to cut otherwise - unless you're into helicopter soaping, which I'm not.

 

[Dawni]

It depends on if you're making a salt bar, a brine bar or a regular bar with salt as an additive.

The first one, people use anywhere from 50-100% I believe, like KiwiMoose said. I've tried only 50% and added at trace, but after I separated the batter for colors.

The second one would use 25% of the salt completely dissolved in your liquid before adding the lye. I've used more though. Completely saturated brine with an unknown amount of salt dissolved in the water called for by the recipe.

The last one, where it's an additive used to aid in hardness is generally 1tsp ppo dissolved in the liquid before the lye.

Please do search on whether those salts are scratchy or not.. There are stories of people getting cut with their salt bars..

 

[Arimara]

Here's my two cents- do not use pink himalayan salt by any means unless you mix it with your liquids. Even the fine ground versions of that salt will feel like saponified sand paper.