Hello everyone! As I’m sure you all know, lately I’ve been experimenting with making many different soap recipes. One of the recipes I made this week was actually a Taiwan Swirl Soap. It seemed like such a gorgeous idea and I figured I could handle that! Well, I actually ended up making this soap twice, because the first time I tried out this recipe, I ended up having quite a few problems! However, being a beginner, these problems were actually a great learning experience.
One of my first problems was temperature. In cold process soap making, you have to wait for your lye water and oils to cool down to the right temperature before creating your soap. The most common temperature used is around 100 degrees Fahrenheit. However, for cold process soaping, if you wait until your lye and oils have gone down to room temperature (72 degrees Fahrenheit) and are within ten degrees of each other, the lower temperature will actually give you more time to work and create your soap. On my first batch of this soap, I did not wait to soap at 72 degrees. Instead, I began the soap making process at 100 degrees. The higher temperatures gave me less time to work and my soap ended up setting up much faster than I wanted!
Because my soap set up faster than I wanted, I had problems creating my swirls in this batch of soap. By the time that I was pouring the top of the soap, it had already begun to harden and clump. As you can see in the picture below, by the time I was able to begin swirling the top of the soap, the blue topping was already setting up. This caused the swirling effect not to turn out.
I also colored the base the exact same blue as the blue on top. In theory, we thought a blue base with blue, pink, purple, and white on top would be beautiful! In reality, because they were the exact shade of blue, it was not an appealing look. For the second batch, I added all four colors throughout the entire soap and swirled them. This gave a gorgeous effect instead of just having random colors on only parts of the top of the soap.
Always remember, soaping at a lower temperature will give you so much more time to work to create your soap! If you soap at higher temperatures, you will have to work faster to create it all. While my Taiwan Soap problems were minor, I thought you would all like to know what happened! For all the experienced soap makers out there, I would love to hear about any problems you’ve encountered making a soap like this! Please contact us here at Nature’s Garden! You can always contact us if you have any thoughts, questions, or concerns as well! Make sure to go and check out all of our amazing free recipes and classes! Remember to keep watching for even more Enlightened by Layla!