Candybee

Glad I had advice to give that was helpful to you. It's really a good thing to test out your soap at various times during its cure time. It gives you the opportunity to observe firsthand the difference between soap that is brand new to soap that has had a long cure time and any in between times you test it out. My favorite is to test at 1-2 days old verses 4-8 weeks. I just take a bar out of my batch, try it, then put it away to test later. My fav soaps tend to be a year old or longer. So sudsy, moisturizing, and gentle. Re how your skin feels. Now you know the difference between using a commercial brand soap vs handmade from scratch. There is no comparison when it comes to a well made cold process soap. Your skin can feel the difference and the comfort level of your skin using a cold process soap is so much superior compared to a commercial bar. I find commercial soaps like Dove to be drying. It also leaves a film on my skin, my skin feels dry, filmy, dirty, itchy, and uncomfortable using it. I only wash with my handmade soap as I can no longer tolerate commercial soap.

It can be a confusing lesson to learn for some chandlers when they see suppliers that sell candlemaking bowls and coconut shells and list them as candle containers. If a supplier sells them they must be safe, right? I assume that is what some chandlers believe. So at least part of the blame can be the bowl and coconut shell sellers.

Seriously? Someone made a candle out of that???!!!! I am speechless!

Is it just with that particular fragrance? If so, maybe with this one you have to heat the wax a bit higher before adding so it incorporates better. I don't think I have seen that before. From the pic it reminds me of a murky pond water, like the contents are not emulsified or blended thoroughly. Not saying you did that, but it appears they could have become separated on their own.

Just wanted to add my 2 cents on the lavender pumpkin. It is a lovely combo that has an upscale spa vibe about it. I loved the combo when I tried it. I tend to do many of the same scent blends from year to year but to rotate some out and add a few new ones. But those that are keepers I continue because customers get mad at me if I don't, they continue to be best sellers year after year, and I already have many of the oils already in stock and simply reorder as I run out and this saves me money.\ Having said all that here are some of my fall best sellers: Cinnamon Broom - FB Cinnamon Apple - blend of cinnamon broom FB, macintosh apple CS, and christmas splendor C&S Pumpkin Pie Spice - blend of CS pumpkin pie & pumpkin souffle Cranberry Orange Spice - blend of CS cranberry marmalade and C&S orange Warm Autumn Spice - Fillmore's nutmeg & ginger Blueberry Pumpkin - JS, this is a fairly new one that made a big hit so kept it Frosted Gingerbread - blend of FB gingerbread and JS buttery gingerbread Pumpkin Streudel - blend of CS struedel & spice and Fillmore's pumpkin chutney Dutch Apple Pie - blend of Peak's/Keystone warm apple pie and FB pie crust I usually do 14 fall scents and add another 7 christmas as I start selling christmas candles in September along with fall line.

That 70% OO soap with the CO and castor should be awesome! Let me know how it turns out. BTW-- I think everyone "cheats" a bit and tries a piece of their curing soap before it cures. I tend to try a piece after 1-2 days, then maybe a week or two later, and so on. It seems like every batch of soap I make no matter if it was my very first to my latest I always am fascinated by it since its something I made that actually tiurned into soap and came out so nice!

Love the little metal creamers idea TT!👍

Good luck in your soapmaking ventures! and don't worry about soaping disasters, happens to the best of us and they can be useful in learning more than if it never happened. I have had some happy mistakes and others that have shaped the way I approach soapmaking ever since. My experience is start simple before you start using a lot of techniques or expensive oils or additives. that is stuff for a more experienced soaper. Once you are familiar with a small amount of oils then start expanding from there. Even after all this time I can say the best soaps are still the simplest with the fewest oils and butters. The trifecta of soaping oils is: olive, coconut, and palm oils. Practice with these to start then branch out. I started out buying all my soaping ingredients in town and not online. If I couldn't find it at the local grocers or walmart I didn't use it. I bought my lye at the local hardware too. An excellent fat to try in soapmaking that you can buy cheap at walmart is lard or shortening. I used to buy their manteca brand lard in the plastic bucket. And walmart carries 2 different shortenings; one thats vegan (palm & hydrogenated soy,similar to the new Crisco) and one that's made with animal fats (tallow (beef fat) and palm. I hope I am remembering the right ingredients. Anyway, either one, shortening or lard make wonderful skin loving soaps. Every soaper should try making a soap using an animal fat. You would not believe the creaminess and wonderful suds they make! Unfortunately, customers like the buzz word vegan and that's what sells for me the most. I still have one soap I make with lard for acne and its a good seller and one of my personal favorite soaps because of the creaminess. Also, try simple recipes with 1-4 fats. Example of 4 different recipes for a beginner to try: 1. Olive Oil 100% (castile) 2. Olive Oil 90%, Castor Oil 10% (bastile) 3. Olive oil 50%, Coconut Oil 25%, Lard 25% 4. Olive oil 50%, Coconut oil 25%, palm oil 25% I learned a simple formulary for making my own recipes when I first started out: 50% liquid oils 50% solid fats This basic formula gives you a good balance of solid to liquid oils that works for many combinations of fats and oils. So if you have olive oil, shortening, almond oil, and coconut oil you can make a recipe by dividing you solid fats and liquid fats 50/50% Examples: Olive Oil 45% Coconut Oil 20% Shortening 30% Almond Oil 5% This recipe gives you 50% solid fats and 50% liquid fats/oils and will make a lovely bar of soap. Just make sure you would run it through a good soap calculator to get the proper amount of lye and water. You can make a ton of recipes using the 50/50% solid/liquid split for formulating your recipes. Its perfect for a beginner because you can pretty much make a variety of soaps that will turn out great. Also, once you have the experience developing your recipes you can change it up.

Olive oil does not give off a scent in soap. I wouldn't worry about it. I love unscented soap. Just a nice clean scent of soap. Oven process is simply another heating source for making hot processed soap. That is all hot process means; using an external heating source to help speed up the saponification of the soap. Cold process is allowing the soap to heat naturally without the use of an external source like an oven, crockpot, double boiler, rice cooker, etc. The lye added to the oils starts the saponification process. Using a heat source like a crockpot speeds up the saponification in a matter of minutes. Depending on the recipe it could be as little as 20 minutes to an hour or longer. Using the cold process method can take one to three days for the soap to fully saponify. What a lot of new soapers have a problem with is wrapping their head around the fact that no matter which method you use, hot or cold processing, the soap still needs to cure for a minimum of 4-8 weeks for the average soap recipe. Longer for castiles, solseife, salt bars, etc. You cannot get around the cure. Hot processed soap may be fully saponified within an hour but it still needs to cure to be mild, gentle, harder, sudsier, etc. So if you 'cook' your soap using an oven as your heat source you are simply putting the mold with the raw soap in it and using the heat of the over to speed saponification. Crockpot uses the heat from the electric part of the pot to speed the saponification. Most hot process soap makers tend to use a crockpot. I have used an oven to heat my salt bars. But you only want to do that if you are using a mold with dividers or separate individual molds so the bars will separate easily. Salt bars become hard and brittle very quickly and can be hard to impossible to cut. This is why I always use a mold with dividers or silicone molds with individual molds for my salt bars. Hope this info helps you and gives you some more insight into soapmaking and how saponification works. As a soapmaker, you should be able to describe how soap is made and how saponification works if someone were to ask you. Even after years of soapmaking I still do a lot of research especially when I am working on a new recipe. I love making specialty soaps so I always research which oils, butters, liquids, additives, herbs, EO's, etc. are best for the type of soap I want to make. Sorry I got a bit wordy here but I love talking about soapmaking. Will stop here.

thank you.

I love using silicone molds and have silicone liners for all my wood molds. I also use silicone baking molds for my round soaps. What I love about silicone is that soap pops right out of the molds/liners and they are so easy to clean. I have not used them in the oven yet as I do mostly cold processed. But I have made hot processed soap in my crockpot and then when its done use my silicone molds.

I found authentic polynesian Monoi de Tahiti Oil at From Nature with Love. Made to the exact specifications of the french Polynesian government. It's made with tiare flowers infusion in coconut oil. It even comes with a authenticity certificate.

Is this new? I don't recall seeing this before. I got a message that I just earned a new badge. So I clicked on it and it brought up a badge collection window showing how many badges I've earned so far. Just curious about how it works.

I have started making more cosmetic recipes lately that call for heating water/ingredients and holding at 170 degrees. So I think its time to invest in some proper heating equipment. So asking everyone's opinion on what they like to use and why? I'm looking at investing in a couple of double boilers since one of my recipes calls for heating two seperate bowls of ingredients then once they are heated seperately combining them. Then cooling to 110 degrees to add a third bowl of ingredients before mixing altogether. Was considering maybe using my crockpots but not sure I can maintain the right temp as they only heat on 3 temps; high, medium, and warm. Will also be investing in some new themometers as the ones I have are water damaged but still work. But I would like to get some new digital readout kitchen thermometers since now there are so many to choose from and are more affordable.

I used to use sheet cake pans prior to purchasing soap molds when I first started. They were not made of stainless steel. They were cheap pans I bought at Walmart. I lined them with plain ole plastic garbage bags. I have also used freezer wrap. Either works great but garbage bags are really cheap and you can line several molds by cutting up a garbage bag to fit the cake pan. To hold the liners in place I simply used paper clips or clamps I bought from the office supply. I used this method for my first year of making and selling soap until I could afford to start buying professional production soap molds.

I keep my balm liquid by heating in flash bursts in the micro. I keep it hot enough to mix in lip flavor and sweetener and then pour into tubes. I make a pound of lip balm base then store in the fridge in an air tight container. When I want to make lip balms I only heat up 2 oz of balm at a time. This will give me enough to make 12 lip balms per flavor oil. If I do about 4 flavors I have 48 lip balms which will last me for a while. Wanted to add, the absolute best formulary recipe I have found and use came from ITDF. Here it is: 20% beeswax (eg.; candellia, beeswax, cera bellina, carnauba) 25% solid oils (eg.; palm, babassu, coconut, shea) 15% brittle oils/butters (eg.; cocoa butter, capuacu, kokum, mango) 40% liquid oils (eg.; olive, almond, avocado, grapeseed) This recipe is the bomb and really gives you a wonderful, soft, glideable, and moisturizing lip balm. Of course, the fats (butters and oils) you use will make a difference. Also, I split my 20% beeswax using 10% candellia wax and 10% cera bellina beeswax. The cera bellina is important when using grainy butters like shea or mango in your recipe. It helps keep the balm from going grainy.

Wanted to add I love Peaks Ocean. Its got a bit of floral in it but very oceany with sea salt, sea spray, and ozone notes in it. Keystone carries Peaks FOs now.

Can you tell me where you buy river stone? I want to read the description. I used to buy a FO from C&S called sandy stones and have been trying for years to find a replacement.

Update: I just ordered some supplies from WSP on June 21st. My order is arriving tomorrow on the 30th. Just a heads up that their turnaround and shipping times have vastly improved recently. For me that is a normal turnaround time with them pre-pandemic. So I am happy. Also, stockwise, they are getting supplies in at a much faster rate and everything I needed was in stock.

To me Fillmore's Nutmeg & Ginger smells so much like some pumpkin scents I use. However, my go to pumpkin pie scents are still a combo I put together myself. I use Fillmore's Nutmeg & Ginger and just name it Autumn Splendor in the fall or Warm Winter Spice during the winter. It's like having a second pumpkin type scent in my line. For soap I am always on the hunt for a skin safe pumpkin and typically end up blending one with a vanilla. Some say they are skin safe but I won't use it for soap unless they have the IFRA rating for soap at a minimum of 3% so I can at least blend it 50/50 with a good vanilla for pumpkin vanilla. Like I said, many claim their's is soap safe but either don't have the rating document to show or when they do its at a ridiculously low soap safe % that is too low to even bother using in soap.

Yup! Many suppliers minimized staff last year down to a skeleton crew to get all the work done. Now with states lifting some of the mask requirements and more people vaccinated staff should be increasing again over the past few months. I have noticed a difference in turn around times for some of my best suppliers but WSP is still operating like they are in full pandemic lockdown. Doesn't make sense to me to keep using it as an excuse anymore.

Ever since the pandemic they started lengthening their order turnarounds. So for the past couple of years I know to order ahead about a month or more for what I need. They still have competitive prices but the order turnarounds are still a paint in the butt. I have noticed that more suppliers are going back to normal turnaround times this past year. Interesting you mention other suppliers carry the Crafters Choice brand. I just noticed C&S carries the same lotion base I use for a lot less and the turnaround is a couple of days since we are both on the East coast. Even with the shipping added I still save money, so I put it in my recipe notes to order from C&S next time. Hope they realize that their lengthy order turnaround times are losing them customers. They are a big company and may not feel it right away, but other suppliers are catching up with variety and shorter order times and this will hurt them where it counts.

Thanks Kerven! Awesome list. this will keep me busy LOL

Since my revamped soap biz focus's on the sea I am rethinking my soap swirls and wanting to make more oceany looking soaps. I have seen some beautiful wave soaps but can't remember where or who did them. If you know of any youtube videos or other media that teaches some great looking ocean wave or ocean colors techniques I would really love to see them.

It may help to insulate the candle from temp changes when you package it. I always wrap my candles in lots of bubble wrap, tape it closed, then pack in lots and lots of peanuts. Having the bubble wrap around the jar helps insulate it from heat changes. Same with the peanuts, extra insulation along with the bubble wrap. Can't promise it will always work but it should in most cases. I always use this method and besides the insulation from temp changes it also keeps the jars from breaking. You could also look into other packing material that helps insulate from temp changes. Styrofoam type packing (like peanuts) come to mind.