To Gel or Not to Gel The Effect of Starting Temps when Soapmaking By Kelly Bloom Use full Gel when doing CP Overpours Why Make Ungelled Soap? Less heat build up in your soap mold means that the more fragile, or volatile elements of your expensive essential oils, do not get lost to the intense heat that gel stage creates. Did you know the internal temperature of a batch of soap in full gel stage can exceed 220 degrees? This heat can not only burn off the lighter components of essential oil and fragrance oil, but also scorch the proteins in milk. By keeping temps lower, you have lighter colored milk soaps. You don’t have to overcompensate with scent materials, and can save money using less essential oil or fragrance oil. Esthetically, ungelled soap has a very fine, smooth texture. This is because the molecules are moving so S L O W L Y during saponification © 2001 Kelly Bloom, BloomWorks Holdings, LLC & Soapalooza at http://www.soapalooza.com. All text, photos, graphics, artwork and other material in this work are copyrighted and may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission. that they line up ‘dress right dress’ like little soldiers. Try the following experiment: Rub your hands together in a hurried fashion. Feel that warmth? Now rub your hands together very slowly. No heat, right? This is the same principle occurring when you start making Cold Process soap with warm lye and warm oil mixtures. The friction of fast moving molecules builds up to a mass in the center of the mold, resulting in the batch going into ‘gel stage’. If your batch gets too hot, it will result in something we refer to as a soap volcano! By using lower starting lye and oil temps, you constrain the speed the molecules are moving at, thereby limiting the build up of excess heat, and avoid gel stage. Nag Champa in Gel Stage You are looking at a photo of a batch of my swirled Nag Champa soap, poured about 2 hours before this photo was taken. Right now, this batch is in gel stage, but not quite spread to the outermost edges. The mass of soap is having an exothermic reaction, heat is building up as oil and lye molecules are moving about creating friction and transforming into soap. Gel stage starts in the center of the mold, and moves in an outward manner. Eventually, if full gel stage is © 2001 Kelly Bloom, BloomWorks Holdings, LLC & Soapalooza at http://www.soapalooza.com. All text, photos, graphics, artwork and other material in this work are copyrighted and may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission. reached, the entire batch will change to the slightly darker shade that you see almost to the edges of this batch. Sometimes a batch will stay at this point, not enough heat gets generated to extend the exothermic reaction all the way to the mold edges and corners. If you see your batch stopping in a partial gel, you can “push” it the rest of the way by setting your mold in a 170 degree oven for a few hours. External heat will allow the edges, or ‘rind’ of ungelled soap to move toward the rest of the gelled mass. Ungelled Tropical Fruit Slices Next, we have a photo of a batch of yellow & orange swirled Tropical Fruit Slices soap, which was made with lower starting temps. The Tropical Fruit Slices fragrance oil has a high ratio of Grapefruit essential oil in it, which is very volatile. Lower temps and avoiding gel stage allow this fragrance to remain true and strong in the finished soap. I love to use this technique for all my citrus essential oils also. In this second batch using lower temperatures, the base oils were about 75 - 78 degrees, previously mixed, melted, and then cooled. You will need to have at least 40% loose oils to have a cool base oils formula that is still a mixable slurry when 75 - 80 degrees. The lye solution was cooled to 50 - 60 degrees. This batch was mixed very cool, and experienced a temporary “False Trace” where the cold lye solution hits the cool base oils and thickens up initially. The soap mixture quickly loosens up again though as the lye and oils start to react © 2001 Kelly Bloom, BloomWorks Holdings, LLC & Soapalooza at http://www.soapalooza.com. All text, photos, graphics, artwork and other material in this work are copyrighted and may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission. and create friction and heat. Continue mixing as usual, moving right through that false trace. Pour into mold, set into your freezer or refrigerator with no insulation around the mold. (yes, your soap will still saponify, albeit a slower rate, even in the freezer). The Effect of Starting Temps when Soapmaking Ungelled Moondance & Gelled Moondance The pink bar of Moondance herbal soap on the Left below shows where only partial gel occurred in the mold. The upper edge and the rounded right upper corner is more opaque than the lower portion of the soap. The pink bar of Moondance herbal soap on the Right below shows the same formula, same essential oils, duplicate batch made in similar mold. Full gel was achieved by soaping with higher oil and lye solution temps. No “rind effect” like seen on the bar to the Left. Notice that ungelled soap is more opaque than fully gelled soap. (the lower corners of our batches were rounded because this photo is from when we still used shower curtains cut to fit the mold as our liner, we did not get the perfect corners that the silicon lined molds in the photos give us now. The rounded corners were the lower portion of the mold where the liner did not get flush into the mold corners). © 2001 Kelly Bloom, BloomWorks Holdings, LLC & Soapalooza at http://www.soapalooza.com. All text, photos, graphics, artwork and other material in this work are copyrighted and may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission. Ungelled Eucalyptus & Gelled Eucalyptus This Eucalyptus herbal soap was made in two batches. Batch on the left did not go through gel stage. Batch on the Right went through full gel stage. Notice how you can use gel stage, or lack of gel stage, to obtain different soap effects. I like soaps with herbs in them to go through full gel stage. That way, I can see “deeper” into the bar all the lovely herbs that were added to the batch. Ungelled Goat milk soap on Left Both of these batches, Unscented Goat Milk on the Left and Unscented Pumpkin Illipe on the Right are both made with the Low Temp or ungelled soap method. We have beautifully white soap in both instances by making a very concentrated © 2001 Kelly Bloom, BloomWorks Holdings, LLC & Soapalooza at http://www.soapalooza.com. All text, photos, graphics, artwork and other material in this work are copyrighted and may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission. solution of the powdered goat milk, making it thick like cream (small portion of our water weight for this batch mixed up with the amount of Goat Milk powder to have made goat milk out of the full weight of water required for this batch). The Pumpkin Illipe soap is naturally a pretty ivory shade, it is here to show you the level of discoloration the Goat Milk soap is when using very low soapmaking temperatures. © 2001 Kelly Bloom, BloomWorks Holdings, LLC & Soapalooza at http://www.soapalooza.com. All text, photos, graphics, artwork and other material in this work are copyrighted and may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.