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The Process: Making Cold Process Soap.

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   Ever wonder what it takes to make your scrub me™ soap bars so amazing?  Well it's a lot of love and hard work!  We start by making our recipe and decide which type of plant-based, all- natural ingredients we would like to use.  Then, we round up all our items and the soap-making process begins (we will explain in detail in just a bit). After the soap is made it needs to be cut, cured, and packaged.  This whole operation is performed by our small scrub me™ team.  Each bar is handcrafted with care, just for you.

   Every soap and treatment bar starts from scratch.  As you know, we only choose ingredients that have benefits for you and your skin.  We start by brainstorming to decide what type of skin type or concern we would like to target.  Then, we go into our inventory of materials and essential oils and start choosing our items.  This part is the most fun, creating new recipes and blends of ingredients for our customers is such a joy.  Katherine, the founder of scrub me™ has a vast knowledge of ingredients due to her schooling, research, and career as an esthetician.  This means we are able to create the best recipes possible.

scrub me secret: We try to create bars for every skin type.  Dry skin, oily, sensitive, aging, acneic, and more!  You name it, we've made it.  Just check the description on the back of the box and find out which caters to you.

oils and other raw ingredients used in our cold process soap.

  After choosing ingredients and formulating a recipe we are ready to start the cold process process!  We measure out all our oils, essential oils, and other additives in grams.  We aren't giving away any secret recipes today, but there is a science to creating a soap recipe.  You have to have the correct ratio of ingredients; otherwise, your soap will not turn out right.

 Oils are melted and combined before we blend them with the sodium hydroxide (lye) mixture.  During this process the oils become saponified.  This is a reaction that happens when lye is blended with a fat; in this case, we are using oils.  When saponification happens there is no longer any lye or raw oils left in the product.  Saponified oils is the outcome of this reaction and that is essentially what makes the soap.

scrub me secret: cold process soaps can be made with various fats.  common fats include: goat milk, tallow, and oils.  we use a combination of plant-based oils because we like all our products to be vegan.

This is our 'polishing' bar in the making! Two separate colors are made and then gently swirled together.

  Making the saponified oils is a pretty quick process and after that we need to move quickly to finish the soap.  If we take too much time or mix something for too long the mixture will become thick, lumpy, and unusable.  Essential oils, mica powders, clays, and exfoliants are added and mixed.  When everything is combined it is time to pour the soap into the mold.  At this point the soap should be a pudding consistency or a little thinner..

scrub me secret: We use traditional soap molds that form a long, rectangular block of soap that we then cut into soap bars.  There are different mold options that allow you to create different shaped soaps such as circles and squares.

Our 'soothing' bar in its soap mold.

  When we pour the soap into the mold we can add a design.  If we have chosen to do a swirl of colors we will have separated the soap into different bowls before adding color and then made them various different colors.  Then, we gently pour them together in the mold and swirl a few times with a spatula.  Creating a colored line in a soap bar requires us to pour some soap in the bottom of the mold, layer the clay, mica, cocoa or whatever the colorant may be on top of the soap and pour more soap on top.  We repeat this a couple more times depending on how many lines we want.  After all this, the soap needs to stay in the mold for 24 hours to harden up.

scrub me secret: colorful ingredients like lavender buds, flower petals and colored seeds look pretty to put in the soap but lose their color in the soap-making process.  calendula flower petals are the only flower that does not lose its color in soap.

The curing rack.

  After 24 hours the soap is firm enough to remove from the mold.  We then cut our bars from the large block of soap; we make small batches so each batch makes just 25 bars.  When the soap bars are cut we set them on a rack to cure.  Curing takes 6 weeks!  If the soaps are not cured for long enough they will melt quickly in your bath or shower.  When the 6-week mark is reached, the soaps are done and ready to package.

  We hope taking you through our soap-making process helps you appreciate your scrub me™ soap bars even more than you did before!  They truly are everything your skin needs and nothing it doesn't.  Happy Scrubbing!