Pure snow white soap?

[Guest]

Need to make white soap, snow white. Anybody know how? Recipes? Oils? I can figure out a recipe if I know which oils to use and which to avoid. Yes, EVOO is off the list. I think CO and PO are on the list.

 

[Soapmaker Man]

Add some titanium dioxide. It is the most popular whitener used worldwide. Used in candy to soaps. It comes in water dispersible or oil dispersible versions.
For whiter bars, use Palm oil, Palm Kernel oil, Babassu, lard, refined shea butter, refined coco butter, mango butter, safflower, canola.

Paul :wink:

 

[Guest]

Thanks! Actually I've got TiO2 coming tomorrow, and also planning on visiting my local oilmonger. Already planned on getting PKO, got the shea, got the coco butter coming tomorrow, got the canola, can get safflower and lard at the market.

Any additional suggestions are welcome. Oils and fats that come out white or otherwise colorless...

 

[fladais]

palm oil. which to get? refined [bleached and deoderized] or organic?

i'm looking at this site. there's only a slight difference in price, but like our dear lovehound, i want a white bar.

paula

 

[Guest]

Yeah, thanks for the site. I might do some shopping there. I have a local supplier with the same price for coconut 76 ($1.95/#) but your site has a better price for palm (7# bottle $1.77/#, 50# pail $1.20/# compared to my $1.95/# in 5 gal pails). I like the convenience of having a local supplier but the cost of gas kind of decreases the benefit compared to shipping costs on the other hand. I have other business near my oilmonger tomorrow anyway so in this one case I probably come out better even at the higher cost for palm.

I'm sure I'm using refined, deodorized palm and coconut because they are both snow white and odorless, and I'm sure they are both good possible components to making white soap.

Oh I just realized that was a question. You want refined, bleached and deodorized, if available and no matter which oil. Anything virgin is likely to have more color than the processed version. If you really want white you have to find the purest versions of all your ingredients. Note that this may not necessarily make the best quality soap because many of the unsaponifiables are desirable in the final product, and I presume refining removes those good unsaponifiables. You have to make up your mind what you want, the most organic natural soap or the most artistically white soap. You want white of course because it provides the best color contrast with other bright colors, and is also the best color to accept colors because it adds no tint or tinge of its own. This knowledge is from my art experience, another handicraft of mine.

And also note that adding titanium oxide introduces problems of its own. TiO2 is not necessarily a benign ingredient although probably safe at low levels. And adding TiO2 does not adequately substitute for choosing oils that are clear or white because other tinted oils will still have that tint there, and your blocking it out with TiO2 is also going to be enough TiO2 to fight your own added coloring if you're going for a color other than white. IMO TiO2 is only appropriate for producing white and is not appropriate for providing a neutral substrate to be used for achieving other colors. The best bet for that is to start out with neutrally colored oils in the first place.

 

[fladais]

thanks for the info!!!

friday i made some soap using coconut, olive, crisco and palm kernal. i took some aside to color it orange and i used tangerine EO. the orange turned out pretty. but the other turned out yellow. it's not an ugly soap, but i wanted white.

 

[Guest]

I'm pretty sure the coconut is okay and probably the crisco but the olive is a definite no-no. I've never seen olive that didn't have some tint, and all the bars I've made with olive are yellowish (or can be greenish). I think your yellow probably came from the olive.

By the way, my "info" in most cases is just a few ideas I gleaned from books and other posts, surrounded by a blizzard of typing. I type pretty fast (80 wpm) so I can just blast out a bunch of text just like I'm talking, but remember that I'm a newbie to soapmaking and that's just newbie talk.

I presume my art training is applicable in many cases but that's an assumption not grounded in soapmaking skills, at least not at present.

 

[Lane]

DONT GEL! The best way, I've found to get a creamy white bar is too not let it gel, which gives it that almost transparent yellow tint...

I used all "white" oils/butters, and it looked snow white! And then it gelled...

 

[Guest]

I might try that no-gel thing... Been reading about it on other sites.

I'm making some 4-bar molds today (if I ever quit typing) just so I can run small tests and learn things with fewer variables. Lazy me, it's more fun to schmooze with soapers than it is to run my table saw.

I intend to make single oil bars for all my major oils (of those that aren't too soft to make bars) just so I can see the qualities of the individual oils, including the color, and I can try the no-gel thing too. In fact I bet small batches are easier to no-gel than bigger batches due to the smaller heat generated.

 

[Soapmaker Man]

Greg, a lot of soapers will even put their fresh poured soap and mold in the refrigerator to prevent gel. Nothing at all wrong with that method.

Personally, I embrace gel. But an ungeled soap is fine also. I just think there is a bit of a difference in cure time and texture of the 2 processes.

Paul

 

[Guest]

Yeah I've been reading another site and the discussions of no gel there. I'm not entirely convinced that no gel is a good thing, but, how the heck am I gonna know unless I try it?

I just finished a couple new mini-molds specifically for this purpose, testing. Each makes only 4 bars, in your preferred size Paul. I'll post some pictures a bit later.

 

[Lane]

Personally, I embrace gel. But an ungeled soap is fine also. I just think there is a bit of a difference in cure time and texture of the 2 processes.

I use to do a complete RTCP without gel... bars were super soft even after 24 hours but they were so creamy looking! If I "power gel" (put the soap right in a warm oven after I pour) It gels in 20 mins and is cooled and hard in another hour...

 

[pjdxxxwa]

Need to make white soap, snow white. Anybody know how? Recipes? Oils? I can figure out a recipe if I know which oils to use and which to avoid. Yes, EVOO is off the list. I think CO and PO are on the list.

Making whie soap is not difficult, just use any oil that is without color or very, very pale in color. Pure grade olive oil, almond, safflower, etc.

I made 100% olive using the Bertonelli (?) Pure Olive that Costco used to sell and after a couple month aging it was so white you almost needed sun glasses. I was quite surprised by it actually. No TD or other artificial whitener.
I can't say how long any particular oil or brand will take to get that white but adding a bit of coconut of palm KERNEL may help, also.

 

[reallyrita]

Pure snow white soap

Here's my 2 cents' worth...for what ever that is worth.LOL
I,too, have gotten absolutely pure white soap and it was gelled soap. It was sort of not on purpose. I was waiting for an order of oil supplies to arrive by UPS and I was very impatient to make a few batches. I bought some Star olive oil at my local supermarket. It was very pale yellow...not virgin or cold pressed or anything I might want for cooking. I found a tub of palm oil at Whole Foods in the baking section and also a jar of coconut oil (refined) there as well. Way way too expensive to repeat this for normal soaping but I was ready to go and too antsy to wait for my order to come. I soaped at around 90 degrees and scented with Lavender EO (I used way way too much of it and our house stank of lavender for weeks!!). This soap was as white as white can be. The last batch of soap that I made was with this exact same recipe, same mold and EO from the same bottle. It was ivory colored and not white. I used my regular oils from Colorado Organics (they look nice and white in their pails) and light olive oil from Sam's club. I sure don't recommend soaping supplies from Whole Foods to anyone because of the outrageous cost, but I did get white from them so I thought I would at least pass on this experience I had. When I used up that stuff on another batch of soap, the batch turned a light tan due to the FO having vanilla in it.
Sometimes I think that everything can look really white in the soap pot and then you add the EO or FO and you get your
discoloration. Gelling probably affects color as well. I happen to love the gelled soaps...their look, their feel and their hardness but I have soaped both ways and in the shower....can't tell the difference. I leave my nongelled ones on the cure rack an extra week or two as they always seem just a bit softer.

 

[Guest]

Re: Pure snow white soap

Way way too expensive to repeat this for normal soaping but I was ready to go and too antsy to wait for my order to come.

Nicotine addicts have been known to run out of cigarettes and needing a fix they'll take an already smoked butt out of the ash tray smoke that. Ask me how I know.

I successfully quit over 25 years ago! I'll bet that some nicotine addicts have even smoked other people's butts, but thank god I don't know that for sure.

 

[Soapmaker Man]

I buy the Bertolli Clasico in 3 liter bottle at Sams. They also handle the Bertolli Extra Lite in smaller jugs. It is really lite and I mix the 2 together. Here is the link to their site so you can see the lightness of the Classico and their Extra Lite OO.

http://www.bertolli.us/oliveoil.aspx

I use that mixture, lard, safflower, PKO, HO sunflower, canola and castor to get a very lite coloured soap, no TD, using goats milk.

Paul

 

[Laurie]

We don't have Sam's here but I buy the Kirkland pure olive oil from Costco and it makes pretty white soap.

Laurie

 

[Guest]

I heard that Costco has better prices than my current $26.50/gal $3.45/lb. I'll have to try some of that Kirkland stuff. I put a Kirkland battery in my last car and it worked fine. I don't know that I'd want to give it a tongue test though. :shock:

 

[SoapyGal]

I use that mixture, lard, safflower, PKO, HO sunflower, canola and castor to get a very lite coloured soap, no TD, using goats milk.

Paul

Paul ~ I was wondering if you would mind sharing with me why you choose these particular oils for soap?

I'm trying to figure out how to choose oils for soap, why to choose some over others, if that makes sense?

Thank you