The Indigo and Jagua Blues

[DeeAnna]

"...Notice how there is some purple bleeding into the glycerin rivers? Cool!..."

I don't remember the color shifts that can occur with varying pH and I know very little about using indigo, so my thoughts might be all wrong ... but here goes anyway....

The more translucent parts of "glycerin rivers" are higher in oleic soap, so these areas will have a slightly higher pH than the adjacent opaque areas with a lower oleic soap content. Could the slight difference in pH be causing the blue to morph toward a more reddish (purple) color?

 

[Mobjack Bay]

"...Notice how there is some purple bleeding into the glycerin rivers? Cool!..."

I don't remember the color shifts that can occur with varying pH and I know very little about using indigo, so my thoughts might be all wrong ... but here goes anyway....

The more translucent parts of "glycerin rivers" are higher in oleic soap, so these areas will have a slightly higher pH than the adjacent opaque areas with a lower oleic soap content. Could the slight difference in pH be causing the blue to morph toward a more reddish (purple) color?

I had no idea that one soap can have smaller scale pH variations due to "rivers", but it's interesting. As far as I can remember, the indigo pigment color is not pH sensitive, and I haven't noticed any color shifts when the pigment goes into lye water. In my Stormy Seas soap, the "rivers" didn't have any purple tones at the beginning, which had me thinking more in terms of movement of a pigment molecule (think gel chromatography; and with apologies to the non-scientist readers). I've read some of what you've written about molecules moving around over time as the soap cures (but have not studied enough to pass a test ), so it seems feasible that the pigment can move.

Natural indigo contains more than one color pigment. Holly (Kapia Mera blog) has written about the pink pigment she can infuse into oil from some kinds of natural indigo. I have since been able to infuse oils with a magenta color using the natural indigo I have on hand. My infusion, shown here, wasn't strong enough to make pink soap with the first recipe I tried.

I'm now wondering what will happen if I use madder, which contains the pH sensitive alizarin pigment, to make a soap with "glycerin rivers." More experiments!

 

[DeeAnna]

Like I said, it's just me musing aloud -- I don't have any definite, solid insider scoop to offer.

 

[Dawni]

Interesting really......

One indigo I used was straight up dried n ground plant material and it was brown in soap. The "Chinese indigo" was more grey than blue, as powder and in soap. The processed indigo tinctoria powder was the only thing that gave me blue.

Haven't gotten any pinks or purples in any of mine, although of course I haven't fully tested all three thoroughly in both CP or HP.

 

[penelopejane]

Interesting really......

One indigo I used was straight up dried n ground plant material and it was brown in soap. The "Chinese indigo" was more grey than blue, as powder and in soap. The processed indigo tinctoria powder was the only thing that gave me blue.

Haven't gotten any pinks or purples in any of mine, although of course I haven't fully tested all three thoroughly in both CP or HP.

How did you process your natural indigo powder before you put it into the soap?

 

[Dawni]

How did you process your natural indigo powder before you put it into the soap?

Didn't. Haha.. I wanted to see if I'd get green or brown. I got brown. I've only added it at trace, not remembered to try using it another way.

 

[penelopejane]

Interesting really......

One indigo I used was straight up dried n ground plant material and it was brown in soap. The "Chinese indigo" was more grey than blue, as powder and in soap. The processed indigo tinctoria powder was the only thing that gave me blue.

Haven't gotten any pinks or purples in any of mine, although of course I haven't fully tested all three thoroughly in both CP or HP.

Dawni the indigo I got is chinese indigo "Indigo naturalis" which comes from indigofera tinctoria. It is a blue powder and gives blue and grey soap depending on how concentrated I use it and whether I add it to the lye or batter.

 

[Dawni]

Dawni the indigo I got is chinese indigo "Indigo naturalis" which comes from indigofera tinctoria. It is a blue powder and gives blue and grey soap depending on how concentrated I use it and whether I add it to the lye or batter.

Depending on which site you read, or which supplier you're using, seems unclear to me which one is naturalis.... What I used for the first two soaps in this thread are not from the tinctoria plant. My supplier labeled mine Baphicacanthus Cusia (Nees) Bremek powder (Qing-Dai), Indigo Naturalis.

 

[Mobjack Bay]

Popping in here to add a link to another thread that discusses the pink color you can get with some indigo, as well as additional discussion of methods for growing and using natural indigo and woad to get shades of blue.

The thread on pink indigo is here:
[URL='https://www.soapmakingforum.com/threads/indigo-pink.75897/page-2#post-793066']https://www.soapmakingforum.com/threads/indigo-pink.75897

And more discussion of blue indigo starts around here in that thread:[/URL]
https://www.soapmakingforum.com/threads/indigo-pink.75897/page-2#post-793066

 

[curlycoat2]

Neither of these two indigo naturalis will give you as a good a blue as the Indigofera Tinctoria. Just different types.

Japanese indigo is fantastic I use it fairly often.

Jagua I find much darker and I personally like lighter blues so I don't tend to use it as often as woad and the indigos.

The Korean indigo that is for sale around the place is adulterated so be careful if you purchase that one. It looks like it has um blue added to it.

My oil infusions and alcohol infusions of both indigo and woad are pink in the jar not in the soap. I will have to give it a try to see if I can get pink from them.

Soaping with plants is just fantastic fun so intriguing to see what you end up with.

 

[Mobjack Bay]

Neither of these two indigo naturalis will give you as a good a blue as the Indigofera Tinctoria. Just different types.

Japanese indigo is fantastic I use it fairly often.

Jagua I find much darker and I personally like lighter blues so I don't tend to use it as often as woad and the indigos.

The Korean indigo that is for sale around the place is adulterated so be careful if you purchase that one. It looks like it has um blue added to it.

My oil infusions and alcohol infusions of both indigo and woad are pink in the jar not in the soap. I will have to give it a try to see if I can get pink from them.

Soaping with plants is just fantastic fun so intriguing to see what you end up with.

I keep meaning to track down some Japanese indigo to try. I have succeeded in getting a very pale pink from my oil infused with indigo, using the oil at 20% of my total. It must take a very strong infusion compared with what is needed to get blue.

 

[Mobjack Bay]

Here’s an update on my soaps made with Jagua and indigo. All soaps were stored in brown paper bags and at room temperature from 8 weeks on.

Jagua (left) is 8 months old and continues to fade, even in dark.
Indigo (center) is 7 months old and looks very bright. The indigo (from Nuture) was dispersed in oil.
Indigo (left) is 6 months old and has faded some, but still an acceptable blue. The indigo was added to the lye water for this one.

Details on how they were made, bases used, etc. are given above, or in linked threads.

 

[Mobjack Bay]

I’m liking the looks of this batch in the mold even though I was aiming for a lighter shade. The color started with a bit of pre-reduced indigo crystals from Dharma Trading, which I mixed into household ammonia about a month ago. The liquid was reduced down today and then mixed with a slurried kaolin clay I had sitting around (yes, my methods are all over the place). Interestingly, the batter did not go grey when the lye hit, perhaps because this is synthetic indigo, or maybe it was magic. Scented with a mix of BB’s FOs Juniper & Sage and Lavender.



ETA: I totally forgot to add that this batch has some brine in it. It’s not enough to make it a full brine soap, but I wanted to mention it because I think I’ve read somewhere that salt can influence natural indigo colorants in soap.

 

[Mobjack Bay]

Here’s the rough cut of the soap from yesterday. What a gorgeous blue it is. I made the soap to the left a couple of weeks ago using the same indigo in ammonia solution I used for the dark blue soap, but I added much less indigo and no clay. I was trying to get a pale blue for that one, but ended up with that beautiful aqua color. I also added a very small amount of annatto oil to some of the batter for top, hoping to get green. I ended up with a very pale olive green. That soap also went white at all of the edges, which was another surprise. I stamped it with a turtle because it reminds me of a tropical lagoon.

 

[szaza]

Oh my, those are some gorgeous blue soaps.. I'm in awe..
Your method sounded rather complicated, but the colors seem to be worth all the effort!

 

[Mobjack Bay]

Oh my, those are some gorgeous blue soaps.. I'm in awe..
Your method sounded rather complicated, but the colors seem to be worth all the effort!

It’s not so complicated. Household ammonia turns out to be a good solvent for the indigo pigment and it’s easy to make a concentrated water soluble liquid indigo “dye” that can be added to the recipe without having to correct for the alkali (or you could if you wanted to). Here’s why:

The NH4OH is only 5% of the household ammonia. As given on the Soapy Stuff website: “1 gram of 5% household ammonia solution is equivalent to 0.044 grams of NaOH.” For the turtle soap, I added 1/2 tsp of indigo in ammonia solution for 400 g of oils. For conversion purposes, 1 tsp of water weighs about 5 g. If I assume that all of my solution is household ammonia (which it’s not because it has some indigo in it), that ammonia weighs the same as water (probably close) and no ammonia gas has evaporated (not true) then the maximum amount of NaOH “equivalent” I’m adding is as follows,

The NH4OH in 2.5 grams (1/2 tsp) of 5% household ammonia is equivalent to 2.5 g x 0.044 = 0.11 g NaOH. This is a tiny amount of additional alkali compared with the 60 g of NaOH in the recipe.

When I use the liquid indigo “dye”, I’m not correcting for the added NH4OH. I’ve been letting the solution evaporate in order to release some of the ammonia gas, but I probably don’t need to do that given that the amount of added NH4OH is so tiny relative to the size of the recipes. As expected, there’s no residual odor of ammonia in these recent soaps. However, when I used a weaker madder in household ammonia “dye” as a full water replacement for a batch of soap last year, I got a lingering odor of ammonia for weeks even though I corrected for using both NaOH and NH4OH. It’s possible I did the calculation incorrectly for that batch, but I haven’t gone back to my notes to check. Now, I’m finding that using a concentrated solution of indigo and household ammonia is a convenient way to add the colorant without having to correct for the amount of NaOH vs. NH4OH. Plus, the ammonia solution appears to be shelf stable for indigo (including the natural powder) for weeks at least. The madder powder I have seems to go a little more brown over time in ammonia compared with 50% water and 50% isopropanol (91%).

Note: I measured the indigo solution by volume for the lighter soap and by weight for the darker soap. Now that I’ve done the conversion approximation for the lighter soap, I know that I used about 6x as much indigo solution for the darker soap compared with the lighter one. No wonder it’s so blue!

 

[szaza]

Indigo in ammonia has been put on the to try list I have a bit too much going on to try it now, but will come back to it later. The only thing I'm wondering is if it'll work the same with indigofera tinctoria powder as I understand the pre reduced crystals don't have the red pigment, so the color might be different?

 

[Mobjack Bay]

Indigo in ammonia has been put on the to try list I have a bit too much going on to try it now, but will come back to it later. The only thing I'm wondering is if it'll work the same with indigofera tinctoria powder as I understand the pre reduced crystals don't have the red pigment, so the color might be different?

It works with the powder I have (Baphicacanthus). When the powder settles in the jar, the liquid is a bit pink, but I shake the jar before I use it. My powder is very, very fine and not detectable in the soaps when I use them.

 

[penelopejane]

I made a tester (see above in post #13 above and was aiming for soap #4.
Made it exactly the same way but increased the size of the mix x 5. Used the same indigo, with the exact proportions, same heat etc. and the soap turned out a dull pale slate grey.
The heat infused oil had been sitting in a glass container for a while but I mixed it well.
So disappointed.

@Mobjack Bay has your synthetic indigo in the post from feb 2020 faded at all?

 

[curlycoat2]

Don't be disappointed it can and does happen often that what you expected doesn't occur. As you are in Australia I would think you have the right INCI for indigo that you are using. Did you let the infusion sit after you heat infused it or did you just heat infuse and then use it. Indigo can be fickle. I prefer to not heat infuse it but also how you use it will depend again on the type of indigo you have i.e. INCI