How To Make Translucent Soap
Translucent handmade soap can be absolutely beautiful. Picture perfectly clear soaps with suspended flowers or leaves or tinted soaps with just enough translucencies so the light can pass through them and illuminate them from within.
Pretty, right?
Making your own translucent soap is not very difficult but it does require patience and a lot of comfort with hot process soap making. There are a multitude of transparent soap recipes about, so below we go through some of the basic rules to making translucent soap.
To make soap translucent, the soap crystals must be dissolved to the point that they allow light to pass through them. This is done through a mixture of solvents added to the hot process method before the soap is poured into molds.
The solvents used in this process can vary, but the absolute best solvent is alcohol. Denatured ethylalcohol at 90% will give you the best possible results. This is followed by glycerin, which will make clear soap but is also very hygroscopic, in that it attracts water. So add too much and your soap runs the risk of being soft and sticky and the translucency can fade after a time and become cloudy.
Sugar is also a great solvent and is necessary to make the soap fully translucent. Like glycerin though, too much means that your soap will become cloudy and sweaty.
Most soap recipes will request that all three solvents be added at different ratios to create perfectly clear soaps.
When making your soap, you’ll want a recipe that has at least 75% hard oils, like palm kernel, coconut oil or tallow. All the solvents that you need to add to make soap clear means that it can break down a recipe make with soft oils. Including castor oil in your recipe can also help maintain the lather that hard oils may remove.
When making your soap, you’ll want to make sure you have plenty of air movement and avoid open flames due to the alcohol evaporation.
When you’re near the end of your soap making process, you’ll want to check it for clarity by pouring a bit of your mixture into a cold glass cup. The level of cloudiness will let you know how much longer you need to cook the soap.
Crafter's Choice Melt & Pour Soap Base from Crafter's Choice on Vimeo.
Should I Use Fragrance Oils In My Soap?
How can you tell if it’s fragrance oils?
It’s usually pretty easy to tell if the soap you’re using has fragrance oils in it. For one, fragrance oils are usually used to capture scents that are either not naturally found in nature or are impossible to distill down to an essential oil. This includes candy-like smells, like cotton candy or pumpkin pie, or other food related scents like cupcake, apple or apricot. These scents, while they can be naturally created, cannot ever be distilled down to a fragrance.
Is there any danger in using fragrance oils?
Using fragrance oils is a personal preference. The scents they produce can be stronger and more stable when making some kinds of soap. Fragrance oils can be tricky in cold process soaps and have been known to accelerate trace, rice or morph in cold process but many companies test their fragrance oils to confirm whether or not they will behave in cold process. Fragrance oils can also capture scents that you will never be able to create with essential oils.
Unfortunately, fragrance oils are made using chemicals, some of which have very dodgy health ratings. Some ingredients used in common fragrance oils have been found to be carcinogenic. Other issues can result from people being sensitive to fragrance oils and their use can cause burning of the nostrils, headaches or aversion.
Is there any benefit to using fragrance oils?
Essential oils are genuine distillations of herbs, flowers or roots that have not been cut with any kind of carrier oils. While they are natural, essential oils can be too strong to use directly on the skin and often have to be diluted.
Fragrance oils, on the other hand, can capture scents that would be dangerous if used naturally, since the plants may be irritants or poisonous. Fragrance oils are also less expensive than essential oils, which can be great for the cash-strapped soap maker.