I have been wanting to make whipped soap(aka floap because it floats) for a while now. Saturday, I decided to give it a go.
The recipe I found called for palm oil, coconut oil, olive oil and lye. The important thing about making floap, I read, was to have a high percentage of "hard oils", oils that are solid at room temperature. Armed with that knowledge, naturally, I began to change the recipe.
I substituted some of the palm oil with shea butter as I'm a huge fan of shea butter and not so much of palm oil.
I whipped the unheated hard oils up so they looked like whipped cream. I then added the olive oil and whipped it in. Next, I added room temperature lye to the mix and whipped it in as well.
Since I was trying a new recipe, I decided I'd also try using mica to color it. I've never added colorants to my soap before and was anxious to see how it would work.
I divided the soap in half and added lavender mica to one half. Looked pretty good.
I added the uncolored soap to the mold and put a few ground lavender flowers in it. I have found lavender flowers turn brown when added to soap so putting them in the middle of soap still gives a nice scent and exfoliation without the unattractive brown flowers in full view.
I then added the colored soap on top of the lavender flowers. Definitely a difference in color at this stage.
Unfortunately, when the soap was ready to remove from the mold, it was entirely white. A very nice, perfect white, but white none the less. There was no trace of the lavender color, bummer.
Since I really wanted a lavender color (this was lavender soap, after all) I decided to paint on the mica with a small brush. Much to my surprise, it worked.
Next time I try this I think I'll try to paint a lavender flower on the soap instead of just painting all over, but overall, I'm not too unhappy with the soap..err..floap.
If you want it, here's the recipe I used:
Palm Oil 300g
Shea Butter 100 g
Coconut Oil 200g
Olive Oil 50g
Caustic Soda 95g
Water 244g
