Showing posts with label Castile Soap. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Castile Soap. Show all posts

Tuesday, July 22, 2014

Another Castile Soap




Another Castile soap…scented in essential oils of lemon, sage, and ginger…Again what is Castile soap? It is soap made with a formula of 100% olive oil-meaning no other oils or butters were used in the making of this soap. This soap is still so friggin soft even after 3 days in the mold! I steeped some grated lemon peel in my lye solution to give it a sunny yellow color which of course you can’t see cause I didn’t angle the soaps right duh…I sprinkled the tops with some dried calendula.


I’ll have to let this soap cure for at least 3 months-just in time for the holidays. I’m hoping it will be rock hard by then…

Monday, September 19, 2011

Bitch Post #12: You Call It Castile, I Call It Baloney!

Time for a new pic...I look nothing like this anymore, lol!
I haven’t done a bitch post in a long time, and I’m long overdue! Bitching is so therapeutic, and one of my biggest pet peeves is misinformation (or misleading information)-of any kind. When I see listings for Castile soap, the first thing I look at are the ingredients, and guess what? Eight times out of ten, I’ll see something like this:

Olive oil, coconut oil….
Wrong. WRONG. WRONG!

A true Castile soap has only one oil: Olive. If a soap has filler oils even in the most minute amounts, then it cannot be called a true Castile soap. Amy from The Olde Crone has a good word for those soaps: Bastile, or bastardized Castile soap. One thing about Castile soaps that I like but others may find a real turnoff, is the lather. The lather is dense and creamy-not very bubbly-although I’ve seen some Castile soaps that have cured for up to a year (I personally can barely wait 3-4 weeks, yet alone a year for a soap to cure) and the lather was sick-as in frothy and abundant. 

Stone Washed Denim
 I have made only 2 Castile soaps in my three years of making cold and hot processed soaps. The first one I made back in late 2008? I called it Stone Washed Denim, and it was scented in a clean cotton scent. I did notice that the bars were still kind of soft even after about a month, so I let them sit. And sit. And sit.  I would say these bars did not fully cure until about month 3. I sold the last bar probably about 6 months after I listed it, and it was rock hard. That experience deterred me from making another Castile soap-until now.

Castile My Beating Heart

Castile My Beating Heart
This new batch of Castile soap I call Castile My Beating Heart (after Sting’s Be Still My Beating Heart). It’s colorless and scented in a blend of chamomile, neroli, and sweet orange essential oils. I’m not a big fan of chamomile, so I wanted to get rid of what I had. It’s a little too strong for my liking, so I cut it with the sweet orange, but it didn’t do much good. It might as well be chamomile soap. Any way, I CPOP’ed this batch, and it’s made a noticeable difference in the cutting and curing time. I waited a day to actually un-mold and slice the soap, and my knife glided (Why did I almost type glode as in ride/rode?) right through it. There was no sticky residual soap left on my knife. After 3 weeks, the soap is about 90% firm, but I’m going to let this one cure for at least another month. I sprinkled the tops with calendula, cut lemongrass, and poppy seeds because it was just too naked. So….

I know there are varying opinions on this subject, and I welcome your thoughts.

Side Bar: Speaking of long overdue, this blog was long overdue for a makeover. I'm a colorful person (Absolutely no pun intended), and I needed my blog to reflect that, so KA-BLAMMO!!!  I told my new graphics designer to go buck wild-like Skittles on acid. I not only wanted you to taste the rainbow, but swallow it...You like?