Soap Lily: RIP grapefruit and orange, hello to Sweet Orange Chili Pepper

Sweet Orange Chili Pepper Soap

September 25, 2014

For some reason we've gotten on a re-batching kick. Maybe it's because fall is seriously in the air - new season, out with the old in with the new scents, you get the drift.

Many of our soaping blog posts reveal the fact that we are learning about soaping every single time we make a batch. Whether it's HP, CP, or a re-batch, we learn something.

Today as we worked on re-batching a couple of our citrus soaps, we reviewed our notes from the days when we made those batches, we looked up questions on the Internet, we formed some hypotheses, and came up with some possible conclusions.

One possible explanation for why our beautiful soaps seemed less than powerful in the scent department is that we simply didn't use enough essential oils or fragrance oils.

Another possibility is that the scents simply do not hold up. We read many reviews and comments on various Web sites where soapers have written about citrus oils that either faded or disappeared during the curing or shortly thereafter. It sounds exactly like what happened to our soaps.

The third possible reason that neither the Grapefruit nor the Orange soap had much scent is because the fragrance oil may have "flashed" off. We weren't totally aware of flash points when we did this soap, and merrily added the scents thinking it would smell wonderful, forever and ever amen. It didn't! Within a couple of weeks we noticed the lack of scent. We could still smell it, ever so faintly if we REALLY tried, but for the untrained nose......no smell.

Scent is critical to successful selling of soaps, it helps if the soap is pretty, but no smell will kill it.

Why are flash points so important? Interesting question, and yet another one where we find a variety of answers. Some say that if you add the fragrance or essential oil when the temperature of the batter is above the stated "flash point" on the label, your scent will flash off, or, disappear. Of course in CP soap, the temperature rises during the gel phase once the batter is in the mold, so if that temperature rises too high, the fragrance can flash off while the soap gels and cures.

Always, always check your flash point, preferably before your soap is made. We now write the flash point on the bottle of each fragrance or essential oil as soon as we take it out of the box when an order comes in.

There is another school of thought, however, that flash points do not refer to how the scent performs at what temperature, but is merely information for transportation and storage. People who handle the oils need to know how cool to keep the oils. As the temperature of the oil rises, the vapor pressure of the oil rises. Once it reaches is flash point, the vapor pressure could lead to combustion. That's why when you order oils, some of them are only shipped by certain methods if they have a low flash point.

We have read some soap blogs that say they don't even worry about flash points because they don't think it applies to the soap making process, but just to the combustion point of the oil itself. However, we are not ready to subscribe to that school of thought yet. We are still careful to pay attention to our flash points and do all we can to be sure that our batter is below that point before we add our EOs or FOs.

All of that is just to say that our citrus essential oils did not stick, so we are taking them and turning them into something new and improved.

So RIP Grapefruit and Orange, you will be happier in your new life as Sweet Orange Chili Pepper, really you will.

After grating all 16 bars of the soaps (the Cuisinart saved
us again), we weighed the flakes and were again almost at 6
pounds.We added 3/4 cup of distilled water to the bag and
tossed it around to mix the water with the flakes.

We tried putting the bag of flakes in our giant pot of simmering water; however, it was too full of soap shavings to fit. We went to plan B where we dumped half the flakes into the crock pot and put the bag with remaining flakes into the giant pot.

When the soap flakes heated up we noticed (again) that the boiling bag works much faster than the crock pot. As the flakes in the bag cooked down and created more room we gradually added the flakes from the crock pot until all flakes were in the bag and had melted.

Initially we had planned to add almost 100% Grapefruit EO to this rebatch, but since the melted flakes were roughly 190 F degrees and the flash point of the EO was 142 F, we had a problem and didn't want history to repeat itself.

After ruling out Tangerine EO (flash point 114), we headed to our scent shelf and quickly zeroed in on +Natures Garden Sweet Orange Chili Pepper FO. With a flash point of 220 F, we would not have to worry about the fragrance flashing off.

Nature's Garden describes this fragrance oil as "the sassy, saucy combination of Valencia Orange, Sparkling Bergamot, Tangerine Zest, Tart Cassis, Orange Juice, Neroli, Ground Pepper, Fiery Chili Pepper, and Sheer Musk."

We added the fragrance oil then mushed, prodded, poked, and mixed it in
while soap was still in the roasting bag.

Wow! The soap in the bag is still really hot. Sorry it's a blurry picture. Alison was moving fast as she mixed the scent into the soap.

Once the scent was thoroughly mixed, we pushed most of the soap to the bottom of the bag. We cut the corner of the bag out and squeezed the soap into the 18 bar mold.

It's amazing how fast rebatched soap hardens. We had to work quickly, and every time we touched the soap it would adhere to our fingers. Messy? Oh yes - flakes and chunks of soap everywhere.

We worked quickly and put in the dividers. For the first time we actually had to use force to push the plastic all the way to the bottom of the mold; it really was getting hard that fast.