Spices, flowers, roots and pollen
This past week I have been testing different ingredients to make a variety of colorful soap. I was given Kum Kum which is made in India for use in the Festival of Colors and worn as a bindi on the forehead. It is made from plants. I was in for a surprise! I started with a red powder and added it to vegetable glycerin. When the soap batter was added the color changed to orange. Then I continued with orange Kum Kum and again added the soap to the color mixture expecting to see either yellow or orange. What did I find? Purple. How could that happen? I went on and added tumeric and got a beautiful rust but that was not what I had anticipated.
The first row shows how the red looks, bottom center is tumeric, upper right is the orange that turned purple and the white was a yellow Kum Kum test.
Needless to say, Kum Kum will color soap but it will not look like the actual color. It morphs to some unpredictable shade of something. The picture below is the colors and powders that I tested.
So what happened and why? When spices or powders are added to a high ph base (soap when first made and in the process of saponification) The ph affects the spice/powder and reacts. Beet Root powder for example is a beautiful deep RED. When that is added to sugar and oil for a sugar scrub it is a pretty pink red. Add that to raw soap and it will be brown.
I wish I would have taken more and more chemistry! New soap makers will try any spice, resin or color mica hoping to achieve a certain shade of red or purple or blue, instead they normally get brown or grey. Indigo powder works to make blue it has been used for centuries. So in a search for the perfect red I am moving on to mica's and pigments that hold constant in a high ph environment.
Today I am testing a red mica that I found and was assured it would maintain the red in soap. My first question was "does that red color have lead"? Avon, Clinique and many cosmetic manufacturers have recently had to pull their products such as lipstick due to the red that was used to color them containing very high levels of lead. I did indeed become concerned after seeing and reading about this problem. Luckily the colored mica and pigments that I have are in line with the FDA make-up, skin and body safe limits.
So today I am trying red and purple mica and then when it is done I will post the results.
I wish I would have taken more and more chemistry! New soap makers will try any spice, resin or color mica hoping to achieve a certain shade of red or purple or blue, instead they normally get brown or grey. Indigo powder works to make blue it has been used for centuries. So in a search for the perfect red I am moving on to mica's and pigments that hold constant in a high ph environment.
Today I am testing a red mica that I found and was assured it would maintain the red in soap. My first question was "does that red color have lead"? Avon, Clinique and many cosmetic manufacturers have recently had to pull their products such as lipstick due to the red that was used to color them containing very high levels of lead. I did indeed become concerned after seeing and reading about this problem. Luckily the colored mica and pigments that I have are in line with the FDA make-up, skin and body safe limits.
So today I am trying red and purple mica and then when it is done I will post the results.