Citrus Herbal Cold Process Soap Recipe

Naturally Repels Mosquitoes and Ticks

 I made a batch of this cold process soap last night. This soap has essential oils that repel mosquitoes and ticks.
I am not sure until I get to try it, if this works with soap. After all, soap gets rinsed off. Either way, it looks cool, and it smells citrus and fantastic!

I didn't have citronella essential oil, so I used lemongrass, which is very close to citronella.


If you would like to try making this, please see the cold process soap recipe below.

When choosing which oils to use in this recipe, I tried to keep in mind, that this color technique requires some time to do, so I avoided using a large percentage of oils that are hard at room temp. I used a higher percentage of olive oil, which will give you some time to make your magic.


Here is a picture of the cold process soap right after I poured and swirled it.
I used a box lined with parchment paper as my mold. For this swirling color technique, you want to use a flat style of mold, since the art work is on the face of the soap bar.

First of all, I made a small batch to test the fragrance oil. Any Soap Maker will tell you that each fragrance oil reacts differently when added to cold process soap. Some fragrance oils will cause your batch to seize up and turn to concrete right before your eyes!

You have to start with good quality fragrance oil or essential oil.

Fragrance Oils are not all created equal. There are a lot of companies out there that buy the concentrated oil and the dilute it and sell it. This is a problem, because not only does it lessen the fragrance, but the added oil they use to dilute it, is not factored into the soap recipe when you run your recipe through a lye calculator.

This can result in runny, oily soap that does not trace properly.

Sadly, I learned this first hand on my first few batches of cold process soap. I followed the soap recipe perfectly, meticulously weighing out all my base oils, lye and water.

The best lesson my failed batches taught me, was to always do a test batch.

Try a 2lb batch and if things go sideways, you may still be able to rebatch it and save the soap.

We will talk about rebatching later. 

If all else fails and you have to pitch the whole batch of soap, your only out 2 lbs instead of 5 lbs.

Here is the Recipe for the 2lb Cold Process Zebra swirl Soap pictured above:

2.31 oz Sweet Almond Oil

10 oz Coconut Oil

16.59 Olive Oil

7.1 oz Palm Oil

3 oz Castor Oil

1 oz Avocado Oil

1/2 tsp Black Oxide

1/2 tsp Titanium Dioxide

1 tsp Sea Clay

1 tsp Nettle Leaf

1 oz Lavender Essential Oil or Fragrance Oil

.50 oz Eucalyptus

.50 Lemongrass

4 TBS Sunflower Oil (Or any light Oil to Disperse Pigment) 

1 tsp Sodium Lactate (optional-will make a harder finished bar)

15.2 oz Distilled Water

5.63 Lye (Sodium Hydroxide)

Directions:

Color Prep: Disperse Colors by adding 1 TBS Sunflower Oil to 1/2 -1 tsp of the Pigments

You will add 1 tsp of each dispersed color into each of the 4 bottles to give you white, green, black, green-gray

In the 1st Bottle add Black Oxide 

In 2nd Bottle add Titanium Dioxide

In 3rd Bottle add Sea Clay

In 4th Bottle add Nettle Leaf Powder

Some soap base will be left natural to add another color to your color scheme.

Set these aside, you will fill these with soap batter later on...

1. Carefully weigh out all your base oils and fragrances- There is nothing worse than getting half way through making a batch of soap and realizing you don't have what you need to complete your recipe. Save yourself a trip back to the lye calculator and be prepared before you begin. I can't stress this enough! 
2. Weigh Distilled Water and put into a glass measuring cup. Weigh lye exactly, and then slowly add it to the water. NEVER ADD WATER TO LYE. Set Aside to cool.
3. Melt Hard Oils First-  In a LARGE glass measuring cup, add the hard oils (coconut and palm oil) and microwave for about 45 seconds at a time until melted. Add remaining oils and put back in the microwave. Microwave for another couple 45 second rounds until the oils are in the 130 range. The oils will take longer to cool than the lye water does, so don't overheat the oil. 
4. Check Temps- Once the Lye Water has cooled to 125 degrees or less, you can stir in the Sodium Lactate. Lye water and Oils should be as close in temps as possible, and never more than a 10 degree difference.
5. Mix Lye water and Oils by hand at first, followed by a few 3 or 4 second blasts with your mixer. Do NOT mix until you reach trace, or your soap will be too thick to pour into the bottles. After short blasts with the mixer, let the soap rest a minute or two. If you can still see oil rising to the top, the oils and lye water have not yet emulsified. Give it a few more blasts just until emulsification, but stopping just short of actual trace.
6. Add fragrance or essential oils, stirring in by hand, Check again to make sure there is no oil rising to the top, if there IS, give it another wuick blast with the mixer.
7. Pour the Soap into the bottles first, fill them each up about 3/4 full
8. Leave remaining soap uncolored. This will be your base.
9. Shake the bottles like crazy!! Make sure you mix the color through evenly, shake shake shake!!!
10. Start by mixing the uncolored base soap until it thickens.
11. squirt a few lines of color into the bottom of the mold. This will make the bottom of the soap bars look pretty. Then, pour about 1/2 of the natural base color over that.
12. Now for the fun part! Taking turns with the colors, squirt the colors lengthwise up and down the mold in a long "S" pattern (see Illustration 1) Try to lay the colors next to each other rather than right on top of each other. Some overlapping will happen, don't worry. The idea is to 'layer' the colors in there.
13. After you have used about half the soap in the bottles. pour remaining uncolored base color lengthwise in straight lines, to add dimension to the colors.
14. Continue again with the bottles, alternating colors, until the mold is full.
15. Using a spatula, drag the spatula opposite way of the lines you made. So go side to side. When you reach the side, curve around and make the same "S" pattern with the spatula.

     This will result in the pretty swirl pattern. You can do this with any color, but I recommend starting with black and white and then adding additional colors from there. Nothing looks sharper nd more contrasting than black and white!

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