Basically the title says it all.
I haven’t been able to find a recipe for soap that calls for cologne or perfume. Usually the recipes call for scented oils. Is it possible to use the perfumes and colognes on my dresser in soap-making?
If this is possible, links for recipes are always appreciated.
There’s a doper around here that specialzes at getting people into a lather, but I can’t recall her name. She even posted thread once on “Ask the soap making woman person…” or something like that.
Thanks astro.
It might be useful to see what kind of recipes you’re thinking of making. The classic bar soap is milled soap, which is hard to make at home. Clear glycerin soaps are easy, but require exact recipes to turn out right. The colognes and perfumes on your dresser usually are dissolved in a carrier, such as alcohol or propylene glycol, which could ruin the consistency or the appearance of the soap.
I believe that the soap expert was Bodypoet, though I may be wrong on that.
The reason that you can’t really use perfumes and colognes, Elysian, is that even “cold” soap making is done at temperatures that will alter the composition of the perfume a whole lot.
Even “fragrance oils” or blended oils can act unpredictably when you mix them in for scenting.
Personally, I stick to plain old essential oils for the most consistent output. I’m going to be making up a batch of peppermint scented “Candy Cane” soap for Christmas gifts this weekend, actually.
The page that I found most helpful when I was learning how to make soap was Miller Soap, because there are explanations and definitions as well as lots and lots of recipes. There’s even a “Botched Batches” section so you can attempt to figure out what you did wrong in the event of a disaster.
Crap. I was afraid of that. They don’t make my favorite cologne-scented soap anymore, and I thought I could perhaps mix up something at home that smelled like it.
I found a website that has oils that smell “like” the perfumes. If I used these oils, would the soap come out okay?
I have never made any soap but I am a good candy maker and seems to be that the precise heating and measuring is similar to soap making. I am confident that with little error or messes I could make something at home.
Here’s the website with the oils:
http://www.nmcnews.org/oils.html
Would that do?
You might consider switching to bath gel. These can be concocted to use cologne as a base.
Soaper doper here, although as usual, I’m slow on the uptake.
If you have a favorite cologne, you might try this site: www.sweetcakes.com for a duplicate in a soap-able oil. Their descriptions are very accurate, and their dupes are dead-on, in my experience. I’ve noticed a LOT of cologne dupes lately, as they seem to have done all the fruit/herb/natural concoctions that they can come up with.
At any rate, your alcohol content of your cologne will probably ruin any cold-processed osap you try. You might be able to add it to a glycerin base, though, but be careful to keep your temps very low. Also, you might consider adding a touch of it to a plain lotion base or something like that, as I think was suggested earlier.
Good luck!
Best,
karol
Can I add citrus zest in melt and make soaps
Something I’ve always wondered about, but it never seemed important enough to start a thread over. If I were ever cast away on Survivor, is there any way I could make soap? There’s usually plenty of glyceride compounds around in the form of coconut oil or animal fat, and there’s always plenty of wood ash. Can you make a functional soap out of those without the benefit of NaOH?
Having the foresight to develop such skills would obviously mark you as a threat and you would be voted off the island immediately; the people on Survivor tend to not know how to start a fire, identify edible plants or use bait on their fish hooks, so being able to make soap is out of the question.
That said, if that’s all it takes, sure, you could make some soap. Might work; might smell worse; might take your skin off if you get the recipe wrong.
I believe grapefruit makes the best smelling zombies, but this is the wrong forum for opinions.
You can make lye by taking all your wood ash and placing it into a container that has a tiny hole in one end that you can place a container under. You then pour in enough water to cover the ash and stir with something other than a hand to get all the ash wet. Run the liquid caught through a second time, then replace the ash with a new batch, and run the caught liquid through that twice. Keep doing this until you get a strong lye solution.
To be honest, unless you have a lot of experience with making lye soap, and handling dangerous chemicals I seriously would not recommend making lye or lye soap out in the field somewhere. It can burn your skin and if even a single drop gets in your eye, you will [not may or can] lose the sight in that eye.
I would probably be better off hiking to the nearest village (which is usually just a couple of hundred yards through the jungle) and trading my hidden Immunity Idol for soap. They can sell it on eBay, and I’ll even autograph it for them. But is there any way to do it with just plant and/or animal fat and something less dangerous than lye?
Not that I’ve heard of, and I’ve read some make-your-own-soap websites and books. The end product is safer if you aim heavier on the fat than you think you might need, but lye is still nasty, caustic stuff.
Ok, you could use potassium hydroxide (KOH), but you aren’t going to be able to make that outside of a lab, it’s still dangerous, and it makes soft soaps like body wash/bath gel, not bar soaps.
Leaching wood ash will give you potassium hydroxide [KOH].
Lye (historically) was the liquid produced by leaching wood ash. It contains Potassium Hydroxide (from potassium carbonate in the ash), and is caustic. Only more recently has lye come to specifically mean Sodium Hydroxide (NaOH) - also known as caustic soda.
Oh, neat! Does that mean old-school soap bars are softer than our standard ones, or do impurities in the process change that, I wonder?