June Intensive Cosmetic College - Day Four

Day Four already! Where has the time gone? Today we had a day of soap - traditional bars of soap and liquid soap.

The initial fears of dealing with soidum hydroxide were soon dispelled although goggle and gloves were donned in order to provide protection against splashes. As the morning progressed, the benefits of the different oils and butters used in soap became apparent and the chosen oils were weighed into the saucepan to melt.

Although Sally forgot to give the blending homework the night before (tut tut!) we all managed to find the time to make delicous blends of essential oils to use in their soap. As discussed in the colour session on Tuesday, we used the Blue FCF colouring to turn our soap a wonderful shade of well - first it was blue, then we watched it turn grey, then a murky burgundy colour and finally amazing and glorious pink!

Once the soap was finished and tucked up under the blankets until tomorrow, we turned our attention to liquid soap. Rather than start the liquid soap from scratch and make up a lye solution with potassium hydroxide, we did the 'white board' method and used a soap paste that was made last month. As this takes such a long time to dilute, we brought it to simmering point and then left it overnight. We look forward to adding stuff to it tomorrow and then bottling it.

We also had fun testing the pH of certain items and coloured our litmus papers anything from bright red (acid) through green (perfect!) to the darkest blue (alkali) which helped us to understand what happens during the saponification process.

In the afternoon's theory session, we discussed making soap using different methods such as the no heat method, the hot process method, slow cooker method and even the rebatching meth

od. So many choices! We didn't stop there - we ran recipes through the Plush Folly SAP calculator, superfatted the recipe using both the SAP calc method and the 'control freak' method.

Finally just when we thought we'd covered everything for the day, we remembered our lovely cleanser sitting in the fridge waiting to be put into pots. It was so much thicker than yesterday now that it had had the chance to cool. We split our cleansers in half and left one half a smooth creamy cleanser to be used with the muslin cloth and to the other half we added bamboo powder to make an exfoliating cleanser.

Sally remembered the homework tonight and we have an example of a label which we need to spot mistakes and note what is missing. There is a little challenge for us to see who can list the most !

I can't believe how quickly this week has gone or how much ground we have covered. We came knowing very little and by day four we know such a lot!

Tomorrow we cover balms/salves, lip gloss and moisturising creams, labels, Trading Standards, suppliers, pricing our products and other bits and pieces. I can't wait!