Have you ever wondered why different soaps feel and clean in different ways? Well, I am making it my goal to educate you this year on soap making processes, how soap is made(in depth), and what each ingredient in soap does for the final bar.
First, lets start on something a little easier to explain. There are three main ways soap makers at your local markets make soap; cold process, hot process and melt + pour. We only use the cold process method.
Cold Process
Cold process soaps are your "pretty" soaps. Cold Process is the when you combine your lye mixture with oils/fats when they are within 10-15 degrees of each other. Once you combine, you use an immersion/stick blender to bring the mixture to trace, then add your super fat, Fragrance, then pour into your mold.
The mixture will then go through a process called saponification, after 24-48 hours you can unmold the soap and cut into bars. The soaps then need to cure for 6-8 weeks to allow the bars to fully harden and dry out. This process is the process we use to make all of our soaps, it provides a nice clean bar with minimal ingredients.
Hot Process
Hot process is similar to cold process, you add your oils and lye mixture in a crockpot and slowly heat up the mixture. This speeds up the saponification process and forces the soap through gel phase. Once the mixture is nice and thick, you can scoop it out into molds. This mixture as already lost a lot of water, so it needs to be unmolded and cut fast, normally within 12 hours. These bars only need to cure for around 2 weeks, but they tend to not look as pleasing to the eye as your cold process soaps. The Hot Process can also cook out some of the health benefits of some soaps.
Melt + Pour
Melt + pour soap is when you buy a pre-made glycerin filled soap base, melt it in a double broiler, add your fragrance and re-pour. I see a lot of these soaps at markets labeled as homemade soaps. These soaps tend to have a lot of unnecessary ingredients so that it can be easily remelted and poured. These soaps will sweat in packaging so many people vacuum seal them.
Lye Mixture: A lye mixture is when you mix either water and sodium hydroxide or goatmilk and sodium hydroxide. This is an important question to ask goat milk soap makers. Some people mix their lye with water to reduce the chances of scorching their milk. This will reduce the amount of goats milk in their soap which would lead to less benefits of the goats milk because that means they are only adding a little bit of milk to the over all batch at trace or when adding oils. Some people also use powdered goat milk at trace which studies have shown to have little to no benefit to certain skin conditions.
I hope this brief overview can help you understand why many soaps look different at markets. If you have any questions about these methods, I will be more than happy to help you understand soap making.