100% Goat Milk Soap - Rose Scented

100% Goat Milk Soap - Rose Scented

I was feeling a little blue with the weather outside turning rainy, so what better way to pass the time than to try to perfect a base recipe! Today's experiment was making 100% goat milk soap with goat milk powder that I bought from the store.

I wanted to use my rose garden fragrance oil that I bought from WSP. It's the fragrance I'm considering using for the soap I plan to make to honor my mother Rosemary who passed away almost 14 years ago. It's very perfumey...just like the roses that my mother used to grow on the side of our house. She loved gardening and really loved her roses. I remember her outside tending to them on an almost daily basis. The scent of her roses is one of my fondest memories of her.

My Mom & Me

Today I went with Lard, sweet almond oil, coconut oil, castor oil along with a mix of cocoa butter, kokum butter and shea butter. My goal is to create an ultra-luxurious soap that feels amazing during the shower and leaves you feeling amazing after you're done.

I switched some things up this time. My testers (husband, son and sister) have all told me they love the soaps, but they find them a little drying. So to try to counter this I decreased my coconut oil percentage from 15% to 10%. This gave me 5% to play with so I decided to add a 3rd butter to see how I liked it.

From what I read cocoa butter will help add to the hardness of the bar which I'll need because I decreased my coconut oil. Shea butter is known for it's super moisturizing properties and kokum butter is just an expensive butter I have a sample of - not sure what it's properties are :)

This soap was going to take a bunch of steps. I decided to soap as cool as possible in order to keep the trace slower. The rose fragrance oil has a tendency to speed things up a little. 

First of all there was the goat milk powder to consider. Because I wanted a 100% goat milk soap, I ended up doing a 1:8 ratio of powder to water. Because this small batch I had just over 4oz of water, I used 1/2oz of goat milk powder. I used some of the oils to make a goat powder slurry which I added once I combined the oils and lye water. 

The next thing I needed to think about was splitting my batch. I wanted to try an in-the-pot swirl for this soap to try it for the first time. I've seen some pretty cool looking results using this technique! After splitting my batch I used some of the oils and mixed in my rose kaolin clay for color and then added this to one part of my batter.

The last thing that I decided to do was to put in the fragrance oil. I split it up and put a little in each part of the batter. Between the goat milk, the clay and the rose - the batter began to thicken so I needed to hurry. I poured the pink into my plain batter in 3 spots.

Then I took my spatula and spun it around once (okay twice) and then through the middle and out of the soap.

So now I poured the thick, gloppy batter into my molds. Yes, by this time it had thickened up to a very thick trace. After pouring my batter I slammed it down a few times to remove the air pockets, put it into a cereal box and then put it into the fridge to do it's thing. Why the fridge? From what I've read milk soaps tend to heat up more than water soaps. I don't want this to overheat too much so I figured that spending overnight in the fridge would probably be best.

I think it looks pretty cool! Also, it's going to be easier to distinguish this soap from my other batch which I used the rose kaolin clay in. I can't wait to unmold this tomorrow and see the results of both the swirling and putting it in the fridge. Fingers crossed!!!!