Soap Making - Adding Colour

A bar of handmade soap is always awesome but you can add your own twist to it with colour. 

Make any recipe you like and once you achieve trace, you are ready for colour. You already know Soap Making - The Basics, so let's go!

You can add colour a few different ways. 

You can use hard white oils (lard and coconut, for example) to create a white bar of finished soap. Using olive oil can add a hint of green, canola and corn oil give a more beige kinda colour.

 Instead of using just distilled water, you could use milk, green tea, or coffee. 

And once you achieve trace you can add in colour using food grade dyes, cosmetics, micas, or pigments. 

For a simple swirled or layered look separate your soap into two halves. 

This is my Pink Lemonade soap, so I am making it half yellow and half pink. 

I added yellow food colouring and gold eye shadow to one half. The food colouring is from the grocery store and the eye shadow I found at the dollar store. 

Hard to tell in these photos but it turned out a nice yellow, with a pretty shimmer.

To the other half I added red food colouring and pink eye shadow.

Now half is yellow and half is pink. 

Pour in a thin layer of pink.

Pour yellow on top. Sorry for the blurry action shot!

Then pink again.

Then yellow, pink, yellow, until all the soap is in the mold layer by layer. 

If you want to half the result look layered just leave it as this. It will look great and you will see the distinct layers of colour when you cut the soap. 

But you can swirl it together a bit too. Use a chopstick, or a spoon handle and gently draw S shapes through the soap, or draw lines across it, or whatever you want. Don't swirl to much or the distinct colours will be lost. 

I did the lines first then did the S curves. 

I gently tapped the top with my fingers to add a texture to the top of the soap.

Here it is 24 hours later. 

Now cut into bars, you can see the layer pattern of the pink and yellow and a bit of swirl that I did. 

I separated this batch in half and made half green sparkle, half red sparkle. First get to thick trace, this ensures that the sparkles will stay suspended and not all sink to the bottom. 

Now add the green and red sparkles.

Layer it and gently swirl!

Another option Adding Texture
~Jess