Made another new soap. How Now. It's a ginger honey soap. I used the same method as Purple Cow, with the previously made white soap tubes. The How Now, however, is all natural. I used only essential oils for fragrance and I was trying to encourage the color change in this soap, rather than trying to arrest it via temperature control, so that the combination of the goat's milk, honey, and essential oils would color the soap naturally. It worked. Smells very gingery.

The picture to the right is of How Now about 30 minutes after it was poured into the mold. You can see that the soap is still a bit translucent. You might even be able to make out the white soap tube that's sitting just under the surface. When it was poured, the batter was a very light, creamy color. With the goat's milk/honey, EO combo, the soap heats up quickly. In fact, if you insulate it (which is what you normally do with non goat's milk soaps), sometimes the soaps gets too hot and people have reported lava-like effects with the soap actually bubbling up and over mold. Not a good thing. With the addition of honey, the likelihood of any strange phenomena is increased. That's just the nature of things.


The next picture to the left is of How Now just after coming out of the mold and before cutting into individual bars and stamping. This soap block, at least from the outside, came together a lot more smoothly than the Purple Cow. That's due to this one being poured into the mold and around the soap tubes while still quite fluid. Both soaps will even out in the end due to the process of hardening and evaporation but I liked the pour on the How Now a lot better. I'll be keeping it in a more liquid state for future pours of either soap.

Here are my ingredients:

goat's milk
extra virgin olive oil
vegetable shortening
coconut oil
palm kernel oil
beeswax
essential oils
castor oil