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Hi - thanks for your replies. Yes the humidity is quite high. I usually soap cooler, about 100/110. But previous threads seem to have suggested that soaping a bit bit warmer might help with soda ash.

Hi I live in England and, unusually for the time of year, we are routinely seeing temperatures around 30 degrees C. I need to make some soap in time for a charity Open Day in the Middle of September. I was going to start now and make over the next two weeks, but the weather is not expected to...

I use lemongrass eo and it is fine -relatively cheap, pongy enough to use at lower quantities and has good staying power. As Deana says, cinamon oil is tricky. Cinamon leaf oil is allowed in soap in the EU rules at 1% or less, but I have a cinamon oil soap and 1% is plenty strong enough to get...

Just to be annoying, I have a palm free recipe which has 35% coconut oil, and most people seem to like it. I know of another another soap maker's award winning recipe which had 45% coconut oil. The biggest problem I found when developing my recipe was maintaining a good level of bubbliness...

I've used pumice in an all purpose working hands bar, along with coffee grounds and coarse sea salt. Everybody loves it where I sell it, but I probably wouldn't recommend it on the face. It is actually marketed as a "working hands" bar, and what I was trying to achieve was a soap that would...

Attempt at uploading pics. God they look awful! On the left is a two layer sandalwood and bentonite clay soap. The white was poured first then cocoa powder added and poured again to get two simple layers. The soda ash seems to be formed along where the layers joined. It is not on top at...

Hi Shunt. No I don't do any of those things, but then in the previous trouble free five years when I was making soap for friends and family I didn't do it either. I don't really understand why, after all this time I seem to be having to fundamentally change the way I make soap after of years...

Well I have conducted my first experiment with the worst affected variety of the soap making a half batch of lemongrass and poppy seed soap. I heated the hard oils for longer, mixing them with soft oils at a higher temperature. I mixed (after much jiggling with bowls of hot and cold water to...

Hi again. Thanks for all your responses. I've been doing some googling and I think PenelopeJane might be right in that it could be a type of soda ash, but not typical. But I've never had it before this recipe (and not while I was developing it either) so it must be a technique issue and...

Thanks for your advice. I am pretty positive it isn't soda ash. For a start it is not on the top of the soap, it forms on all the sides that were in the mould, very little, just the odd streak, on top. I have read that silicon moulds can be dodgy when they get old, but I don' t hink that is...

I have just been making a batch of soap for sale and most of the bars seem to have varying degrees of problems with a whitish bloom on the surface and some have whitish, slightly crumbly edges. The surface bloom seems to come off with a damp cloth and the crumbliness does not go more than a mm...

I think lilyjo is right. Certification is about safety of the product. Whether you sell it or give it away is irrelevent. Giving to friends might be different, but I rather think, that if it came to it, a court would take a dim view of someone trying to get around rules and regs in this fairly...

Soapstars - I would just go by your original quantities in grams. If they were going to change anything they should gave made that clear and would probably have asked you to resubmit so I think you can be confident your ok. Regarding the database, ooh where do I start to describe the joys...

I have actually got the info in two seperate ways in my certification doc. The first batch is definately oil weight, it says so. Then a few pages further on the recipes are repeated and this time it seems to be based on total ingredients weight, so yes each one is different depending on how...

Soapstars - I've given this some further thought. The info I gave you with the oil weight plus SH weight plus 10% water seems to be the basis for the essential oil percentage maximums indicated in the lists on the FAQ page, and was how I was told to submit my recipes. However, the actual...

Salted Fig. I have various info but in e-mail form as attachments. Can you exchange e-mails on this forum? As you say you have to meet EU requirements to import. All the rules should be somewhere on the EU central database but they are not very user friendly. And some you might not be able...

Hi Salted Fig. I knew it was the same assessor because "Scott Grainger" was mentioned in one of the posts and he is the man behind the company that I went with, so unless he has moved it was a fair assumption. But to clarify, the assessor I used was "Cosmetic Safety Consultants" a fairly well...

Hi. I went through this process with the same assessor last July. I asked the same question, because, after making soap for 4 years and merrily sloshing in essential oil till it smelled nice, the rules for assessment had not come up and I found no info googling the questions. I was told that it...

I thought I'd share a recent experience I had with my honey, oatmeal and cinnamon soap. I've made this soap, or variations of it, several times and always worried about putting the honey in at trace in case it didn't mix in evenly. So I was pleased to discover a new technique of dissolving the...

Interesting. After reading your problem I have looked at my latest batch of green soap. It too has white marks on the corners and edges which look slightly crumbly. But so has my yellow soap, to a lesser extent, which was coloured with calendular petals. Weird. But the one soap that hasn,t...