Soap Lily: Carrots and ginger with a little orange tea - alternative liquids in soap making

#carrotandgingersoap #powderedginger #alternativeliquid #soapchallenge

Monday, October 12, 2015

We recently entered a challenge in Amy Warden's Soap Challenge Club in which we were to make a soap using alternative liquids - in other words no water! We've used some "alternative liquids" like honey water, goats milk, almond milk, coffee, wine etc. but we had not yet used a fresh juice.

Not knowing how the soap would turn out, we actually created two different batches on the same day - an Orange Ginger soap and a Carrot Ginger soap. Ultimately we decided to enter the Orange & Ginger Juice soap in the challenge which you can read about here.

In the end, BOTH soaps turned out far better than we had imagined, so let us share the Carrot & Ginger soap process with you, too.

First we juiced about 8 large carrots, then we peeled a "hand" of fresh ginger and juiced that, adding the ginger juice into the carrot juice to give us our liquid. We used the left over ginger pulp and stick blended it right into our oils before we added the lye/juice.

During our discussion about what to use, we researched many sites regarding the benefits of carrots. I was always told (as a little kid) that carrots help you see in the dark...Self Growth had a great article about carrot juice, some of the benefits for the skin are: antioxidant benefits, helps with eczema, dermatitis and rashes, natural sunblock and helps with sunburn. The vitamin C helps promote skin elasticity with collagen production, it also helps improve uneven skin tones and promotes smooth, soft and supple skin. Seriously, what isn't to love about carrots!!

We started reading about ginger and were blown away at how beneficial it is. Style Craze has a great article about the goodness found in ginger, just a few benefits for skin are: skin toning, soothes burns, clears blemishes and acne, and the all important anti-aging. After reading the article both of us decided to add more ginger to our diets.

We decided to add Bentonite clay with a little bit of Orange Spice tea. We figured that the batter mixed with the clay would be lighter and would give us some variation in color. It didn't help very much, but there was some difference. We didn't have any Carrot EO so we mixed our own blend of Rosemary, Litsea Cubeba, and Clove Bud essential oils. The combination is great, and we may have a new EO blend to use.

Once we mixed the batter, we layered the lighter color in the mold first then sprinkled powdered ginger across the top, then we added a layer of batter colored with the Bentonite clay, sprinkled ginger again, then finished up by adding the remaining batter. We used the hanger tool and did a simple hanger swirl, then we swirled the top of the soap with left over light and dark batter.

Please enjoy our YouTube video as we make our batch of alternative liquid - Carrot and Ginger soap.