"It's Greeen"

[Sponiebr]

Yes, the title is from Star Trek. 

 

So, in my great trove of soap making notions I have the following colorant available to me: activated charcoal, a little cocoa powder, BB bronze mica, BB ultramarine blue, Moroccan rose Clay, Moroccan red clay, Rhassoul clay, some annatto seeds (got those last night at Walmart for $.68. Score!!!), and some turmeric (which I'm wary of for right now.) That's it. That's all I have. BUT I DO have 3 primary colors, plus black and brown, and with those I can make a rainbow. (yeah... right! ) I did up a batch of Himalayan Bamboo (CS) tonight and thought that some green might be nice for that loaf. I made green colorant and it turned out to be green, well it's at least green for now.

 

I have 993 g of oils in a batch, let's call it 1 kg to make life simple.

 

So 30g of annatto infused OO. The OO is the last actual measurement that I have as the rest becomes guesswork in VERY small increments that I can't measure.   

 

The very tip of the handle end of a white plastic disposable spoon in charcoal powder. I'm talking about the little 1mm wide ridge that makes up the actual termination of the handle of the spoon, this is a TINY amount of charcoal powder. Let's call it an encounter with the ghost of charcoal powders past amount of charcoal powder... 

 

About 1/16 teaspoon of ultra marine blue.

 

Mix it well. Then... nope. you only think you're done, keep going... for the rest of time...  When eternity has ended, there are STILL going to be little motes of ultra marine undissolved. (It is, what it is.)

 

I added this colorant to about 1/3 of my fragranced light traced soap and did one of those super thin "ghost swirls". It was a lovely olive green when I poured it and if the annatto turns orange it will become a more "green" color, (color theory sez it should anyway).  I'll swing by either tomorrow evening or Sunday and see what happened and get some pictures. 

 

So for those interested I used a 3% annatto infused OO replacement only because I was doing a green swirl against the cream natural colored soap. If I had wanted to do let's say, green and yellow soap I would have added the annatto seeds directly to the hot lye to soak while the lye cooled down. I have not done this yet, I only saw the technique, but it seems to produce a neon highlighter yellow soap. SCREAMING lemon yellow soap. Then I would have only had to mix in some ultra marine blue and maybe charcoal in the swirl portion to get the green which could have been VERY green. A note about the annatto: It was not nearly as evil a staining mess as I had expected it to be. It's actually less staining in the raw and oil infused states than turmeric is in any form. 

 

Thought I'd share that with all y'all. 

 

Good Meevening all! (morning for you, sleep time for me)

 

Sponie

 

  

 

 

 

[Scented]

I wanna see these words of yours in picture

[Candybee]

My pak of annato seeds has been sitting in my soap colorants drawer for years.

 

I once used some turmeric and indigo for an Egyptian musk themed soap... I got the loveliest dark cobalt blue (indigo) for a lapis lazuli type color and gold (tumeric) for the gold foil color accent before the fragrance turned it into a mud color. LOL But before it turned into mud the soaps were gorgeous.

 

Good luck with your green. Hope it sticks for you!

[Sponiebr]

Here's the soap cut, The color is the same was when it was molded. Apparently some flecks of annato got into the mix and there are these little dots of neon yellow here and there. But, yeah... There ya go! Green in only 101 steps as opposed to 1 step. Ta-da!

 

-Sponie the executor of Bad Ideas.  

[Scented]

Actually this is a very pretty and feminine look! I really would like to learn to do infusing. 

[Sponiebr]

On 9/24/2016 at 3:03 PM, Scented said:

I wanna see these words of yours in picture

  Scented, this is the annatto in lye water method: What happens is the bixin is a non water soluble waxy color coating on the seeds, and when you put it in lye the bixin saponifies into norbixin which is water soluble. Bixin produces a orange color in soap and norbixin produces a very bright yellow. 

 

When I mixed this into my fats (I strained it first through an extra fine stainless steel strainer with pantyhose over it.) it traced kind of an oatmeal tan, it wasn't really yellow at all. It did turn more yellow later on after curing a bit. I've got another topic I'll post regarding annatto lye method.  -Sponie

[Scented]

So the key then is to drop into the lye to force the color to surface and then to filter out the seeds as you add the lye to your oils. As with anything, experiment then to get the desired color or do you have a good idea of what you'll get? 

As then say your stuff is powdered already ... how does this work? Like I think it is annetto that I have, but it's in powder form. Can this just be added to the water and lye to draw out the color and would it say not leave behind a gritty, grainy substance or would it just not work. Thank you so very much for the pictures to show me what you're doing. 

[Sponiebr]

10 hours ago, Scented said:

So the key then is to drop into the lye to force the color to surface and then to filter out the seeds as you add the lye to your oils. As with anything, experiment then to get the desired color or do you have a good idea of what you'll get? 

As then say your stuff is powdered already ... how does this work? Like I think it is annetto that I have, but it's in powder form. Can this just be added to the water and lye to draw out the color and would it say not leave behind a gritty, grainy substance or would it just not work. Thank you so very much for the pictures to show me what you're doing. 

Sorry Scented... I didn't catch this until I got my digest. The red coating on the seeds is the bixin so you're not really forcing anything to the surface. What you are doing in the lye process is skipping ahead of the oil process and doing a direct saponification of the bixin in place to make the norbixin which ends up giving you a yellow. In the oil method you're just dissolving the bixin off the seeds and (pretty much like nail polish remover), you're just washing it off basically. I don't see why using ground seeds wouldn't work. The real challenge is to get it cleaned before adding it to your fats. ANY little mote of undissolved annatto bixin will leave a BRIGHT yellow spot in your soap. If you're going for that look it's great! In fact if you were to add a smidgen of ground annatto to your fats it would probably look pretty kewl, assuming you DEFINITELY wanted yellow dots all over the place. 

 

With either method you just gotta make sure you're getting it cleaned out and all you are left with is yellow oil (or lye water). PERSONALLY... I had better luck with the oil method. I'll tack on the link to where I learned all this annatto insanity from. In all fairness he did use MUCH more seed in his lye than I did AND he let it soak longer than I did.  

 

Having said this, I would be SURE that your colorant is in fact annatto, and NOT turmeric. I still haven't determined if it was the turmeric that heated up that Jamacia me Crazy batch, but if it did, (and I think it did) I'd consider turmeric to be a dangerous additive because of the heating it creates. 1.75 oz flat 2x2x.75" thick cups heated to cracked gel in the open air in a 69F air conditioned room with the AC blowing in their direction. THAT kind of unexpected vigorous reaction stuff scares the CRAP outta me. 

 

Here's the annatto link: http://www.soap-making-resource.com/annatto-seeds-soap-making.html