Decorative Soap
Decorative soaps are not just great as personalized gifts. Decorative soap is also great as a home accessory or bathroom display. You can create decorative soaps from premade base by simply adding color, fragrance, and even decorative items to make it look more interesting and eye-catching.
There are dozens of ways to make decorative soap. If you want to create decorate soap from scratch, it will involve mixing fats or oils, water, and wood ashes. Combining wood ashes and water results in the second main ingredient of soap called lye. Lye is a type of alkali. When acid from fats and alkali are mixed together, you get soap. The chemical process is called saponification. Because active lye can be very toxic, and the process of making soap is very tedious so it may well be best if you purchase premade soap and melt it to add the oils and colors that you want it to have. Let’s create a decorative soap by starting off with plain glycerin soap.
You can purchase bricks of glycerin soap from health food stores, grocery, or craft stores. Glycerin is usually transparent or clean tan in color. Glycerin is great for the skin as it doesn’t contain any harsh ingredients and is naturally emollient and a humectant. All you need to do with it is boil it on top of a double boiler until it melts. Then add the essential oils, herbs, and colors you like. You can add decorative items in your mold to add design to your soap. You can add leaves, petals, and even small decorative items. Once mixed, pour into a mold and set for an hour until it’s dry and solid.
Your decorative soap can have dried herbs like lemongrass, clove, chamomile, vanilla, rosemary, and lavender among many others. You can also add various oils such as sweet almond oil, sesame oil, coconut oil, olive oil, grape seed oil, sunflower oil, and jojoba to your decorative soap.