ecobites.com

Making your life greener - one bite at a time.

There's more to soap than froth and bubble. If feeling a little adventurous, here are some exotic handmade soaps for special occasions. These recipes make unusual and personalised gifts - or something special to keep for when you feel like pampering yourself.

Rosewater Soap

Rosewater soap is a fine-textured soap which retains a faint scent of roses. Its properties are slightly astringent, which means it is good for oily skins, although it does not leave the skin feeling tight and harsh like a heavy astringent does.

Use a creamy castile recipe, omit 4 fl oz (120 ml) of the water when making the lye. When the lye is cold, add 4 fl oz (120 ml) of rosewater and mix in well. Bring oil and lye to the required temperature and proceed according to the directions.

Glycerin Soap

Grate or mince well-cured basic Castile soap. Rosewater or eucalyptus soaps are good too. Place grated soap in a pan and add a little water to prevent burning. Do not add to much water or the soap will shrink excessively while setting. If it is a full batch, add 1/2 cup of unrefined glycerin. Adjust for smaller quantities.
Stir over low heat until combined, then pour into molds. This soap is ready to use as soon as it is set because it is already a fully cured soap.
If using a vegetable oil soap or the base soap refused to crumble, glycerin soap, will have the appearance of brawn - a bit weird to look at, but still great to use. If using rosewater soap as the base, a luxurious-sounding rosewater and glycerin soap will be the result. Eucalyptus and glycerin is nice too, even if it does sound like a cough mix! Strangley enough the best soap for recycling a glycerin soap is a granular, understirred batch. It breaks up like a dream in an electric grater. So much for failures!

As mentioned, all these soaps (except the 'brawn') make great gifts, especially if packaged in attractive little calico or print bags. Wrap the soap first in waxed paper so the oils don't leach out and stain the bags. Have fun!

The following are some links for Castile recipes...

From Castile, or Castilia, a province in Spain, from which it originally came. A kind of fine, hard, white or mottled soap, made with olive oil and soda.  Although this soap is slow to lather, a little work yields an abundance of rich, creamy suds mild enough for the most sensitive skin. Castile soap is so gentle, it's often used as baby's first soap.
http://www.pvsoap.com/recipe_castile_soap.htm

In the truest sense, "Castile" is soap made with 100% olive oil, but for my purposes... these are soaps that have a predominant amount of olive oil in the recipes. Adding a couple of other oils makes a soap that still has the mildness of olive oil soap, but won't sometimes take days to reach trace when hand stirred. Kathy Miller http://www.millersoap.com/castile.html

From About.com (Candle and Soap Making)

http://candleandsoap.about.com/od/soaprecipes/a/castrecipe_2.htm
http://candleandsoap.about.com/od/soaprecipes/a/castrecipe_3.htm
http://candleandsoap.about.com/od/soaprecipes/a/castrecipe_4.htm
http://candleandsoap.about.com/od/soaprecipes/a/castrecipe_5.htm