There’s shipping to Tokelau and Vanuatu but not Japan?
Soaps look amazing tho
I ship to all countries (just edited my shipping profile). Thank you!
Just keep them out of reach for toddlers, right? Right?
Yeah I’d advise that lol. I’m an aunt to four and dang did they LOVE putting the most random things in their mouths
They’re to dye for
these look sicknasty. 🤙
I need soap in my life
Well you’re in luck because I got it (and sell it!) in spades! Also I love your username lol
I AM THE CLIT COMMANDER AND I WANT MY BALLS TO SMELL LIKE COTTON CANDY
Oh good, you’re in a different market so you aren’t competing with my mom :P
What do you use for colors? They’ve very vibrant and I know it’s hard to get those reds and blues without fading or staining.
Thank you! Does your mom make soap too?
I use micas and pigments dispersed in sunflower oil. I use proper ratios and a lower superfat to make sure they don’t stain. I also make color blends as I have an art background so instead of buying every shade under the sun I try and mix my own! I test everything myself first to make sure nothing stains and other than some tinted lather (Vaporwave has a beautiful periwinkle blue lather!) I haven’t had it stain my skin or shower 😊
Yeah she’s been selling as a hobby for like 25 years, she got started because typical commercial scents and dyes didn’t play nice with her skin. So she mostly uses natural pigments like clays and oxides and mica. It makes the more saturated colors hard to get (but the earthy stuff plays well in the Seattle market and her business is as big as she wants it to be, so not a lot of pressure to change beyond pure hobby fun).
Oh I love that! I’m currently working on some more natural soaps (essential oils, natural pigments) because my tagline is soap for everybody and every body and I mean that!
Wait, you are making your own soap? Like in your house? I am very curious how this is done. Does it need special machinery?
Yep! You don’t need literal machinery other than a stick blender (stainless steel, NOT aluminum because lye and aluminum aren’t friends) and sturdy plastic (lye will etch away at glass over time and cause it to break) to mix everything in. It’s a lot like cooking but some of the bowls and things used need to be a bit more specific (and NOT used for cooking afterwards!)
Okay this is actually fascinating. Since your reply I’ve been doing some Googling… I’d always thought making soap was a difficult / expensive / complex process that required a lab, special equipment, etc. Like if you look at the ingredients for any soap off the shelf there’s always a bunch of chemical stuff and I always assumed it was some complex interaction between them that makes you clean. Then you say all you need is a blender.
Turns out it’s all just some variant of ‘lye, fat, oil, dye, fragrance’. And the lye gets mixed with something else so they don’t have to call it lye. I feel I’ve been lyed to my whole life </bad pun>.So thank you for opening my eyes to something fascinating that I didn’t know existed yesterday :) I may actually try making soap at some point.
Two questions if I may–
First- for the colors, I assume you prepare two or more batches of the soap liquid, and then layer them in the mold with a small stir. How do you get the honeycomb effect on the oatmeal/milk/honey flavor?
Second- I once was gifted a bar of ‘fancy soap’ that looked similar to yours with larger blocks of solid color, but the different colors all seemed to dissolve at slightly different rates and didn’t adhere together well. Within 2 showers it had fallen apart. How do you prevent that when making soap?
Oh it can be 100% expensive when the ingredients and fragrance/essential oils come into play, trust me! I’ve seen some essential oils go for close to $75/oz. They also need to be soap stable and skin safe, and not something you pick up at a craft or grocery store.
For the Oatmeal, Milk and Honey soap, I put bubble wrap on top, which is how I get the honeycomb effect!
And that sounds really bizarre with the different colors dissolving at different intervals! My best guess is that it wasn’t cold process and was melt and pour (different soapmaking process where you just cut up a soap base, melt it, and add color/fragrance of your choosing. Good for people who don’t want to deal with lye and fun to do with kiddos!) and the different melt and pour bases reacted differently to the water and some melted faster than others. Like a frankensoap if you will!
Haha when I say expensive I mean like expensive to set up the process- I can buy a bar of soap at the store for cheap, I just assumed it needed a million dollar factory to make them :P
Bubble wrap is absolutely genius :)
The soap I had was sort of like this picture, the one with the stars specifically. After 2 or 3 showers I had a white soap bar with holes and a pile of red soap bits (it wasn’t that exact one, It was a football or a dog or something but you get the idea). Frankensoap is a good way to put it :P It really did feel like two different soaps that were just stuck together.
It was as I recall from a fairly large company. With cold process vs. melt & pour is one of them considered ‘better’?Oh yeah that’s definitely a frankensoap lol. It’s cute though! Whether one is better than the other imo kind of depends on personal preference. Cold process is my preference because I have full control over it from start to finish. Melt and pour is using a soap base someone already made and just adding color and fragrance to it. But it can be just as good as cold process if you find a soap base you really like!
I like M&P as a craft for kids though since cold process is a little too dangerous for them with the lye and everything.
Nice work! I love homemade stuff
Ha, loved the Aurora one, clicked on it:
Welp, geography isn’t our friend today. Good luck with sales though, maybe if I ever manage to get a group together I’ll order some too.
UGH, I know and I don’t blame you. Etsy sets the shipping prices on my profile. I want to delve more into shipping costs and how I can save people money because that’s just ridiculous!
Oh hell no. Reddit? Reddit!?!
Yep, that’s how I found Lemmy because Reddit banned my old roommate years ago and now every time I try to make an account it gets banned too. Reddit is dumb and they keep shooting themselves in the foot with this crap, but hey I got some good sales out of it 🤷🏻♀️
Reddit is dumb and they keep shooting themselves in the foot with this crap
Agreed. Sadly I think their management has lost the plot.
Imagine you’re a city mayor, and the more people live in your city the more you get paid. You probably start out trying to build a utopia, but then there’s a slippery slope of ‘well option A is more resident-friendly, but option B will mean more people move in’ and you start with one or two of those because nobody will notice and after a while it becomes a mindset that’s part of every decision process- ‘how will this affect our population?’
Reddit, Facebook/Meta, Twitter, Discord, TikTok, all doing it.
I got banned for mentioning Lemmy too often. Glad you are here.
I fucking hate these kinds of soap because I always feel an intense need to eat them.
With that out of the way these look amazing keep up the great work.
Thank you! I call them “forbidden fudge” 😉 lol
…can one do this with fudge!?
I haven’t tried but you probably could in a limited capacity (more simple swirls and things like that)
Yes, they look like psychedelic taffy.
I wanted to order something, but 32 euros shipping cost for 1 and 43 for 2 is major sad face… It looks amazing! Palm free and vegan is also what I like. Keep up the good work!
Ugh I know, shipping is ridiculous in general, even within the US! Thank you though, your support still means a lot to me 😊
Bummer, can’t use Etsy.
why
No account.
IIRC you can check out as a guest
