Dolphin Soap, Miami-Style

My husband, Ken, is a lifelong Miami Dolphins fan. Being from Florida, his penchant for the Dolphins began in childhood. He fondly recalls how they had a perfect season in 1972, going undefeated and winning the Super Bowl. And he suffered through their nearly winless 1-15 season in 2007. He is loyal through both good times and bad, his affection and devotion to his beloved Fins evident with the start of each new football season.

And the new football season has now begun. I am not a sports fan myself, but I thought it would be fun to combine my passion for soap with his passion for football. Specifically Miami Dolphins football. Actually, Ken suggested that I make a Dolphins soap a while back, but I didn't think of it again until the season started.

So here it is! A Dolphins soap using Miami's team colors: aqua, orange, white, and navy.

And the scent? Energy, of course. It's fresh, clean, and sporty. Perfect for sports-themed soaps. Because the word "sport" is right there in "sporty." Can't have the sporty without the sport.

I envisioned a white soap with orange and aqua swirls and a navy blue dolphin embed in the middle. As I've mentioned, I'm pretty lazy when it comes to making cold process embeds. So, I decided to do a cold process soap with melt-and-pour dolphin embeds.

Making the melt-and-pour dolphin embeds.

I bought this silicone dolphin ice cube tray several years ago - I don't even remember where I got it. Each dolphin weighs about a half-ounce, making it a perfectly sized embed. I chopped up some clear melt-and-pour soap base, melted it in 30-second bursts in the microwave, and colored the soap with a few drops of ultramarine blue liquid colorant. Then I poured the soap into the mold cavities and placed them in the fridge to set up while I got the rest of my soap ready. (I was a little sloppy with a couple of the pours, but no worries. I just used an X-Acto knife to tidy things up after unmolding the embeds.)

Preparing cold process soap.

For the cold process soap, I used a slow-tracing recipe of olive, coconut, palm, and avocado oils so I could make swirls. And Bramble Berry's Energy fragrance oil behaves beautifully and doesn't accelerate trace at all. I mixed it into my cooled oils before adding the lye solution. Once I reached light trace, I poured two 8-ounce portions of soap into separate plastic measuring cups.

Colorants mixed with glycerin.

For the swirls, I used hydrated chrome green pigment with just a few drops of the liquid blue and a bit of titanium dioxide to get an aqua color. For the orange, I used orange mica with a bit of titanium dioxide to soften the color and make it a bit more coral. I added the aqua color to one of the eight-ounce portions, and the orange to the other. The base is colored with titanium dioxide to whiten the soap.

Coloring the soap and making swirls.

I poured the base of white soap into my slab mold, and then poured the orange and aqua from up high to make sure it penetrated through, reserving some for the swirls on top. I poured the remaining aqua and orange close to the surface so it would stay on top, and then dragged my skewer (my thermometer stick worked perfectly) through the soap vertically and then horizontally. After I placed the dividers and let the soap set up a bit, I gently pressed the embeds into the center of each bar. I decided that I liked the bottom of the embeds better than the tops. The bottom had more of a dolphin shape, I thought, and I could make the dolphins lay flush with the tops of the bars by embedding them bottom-side-up.

Swirling and adding embeds.

Then the mold went into the freezer overnight so that the soap wouldn't gel and melt the embeds.

I'm pretty pleased with this soap, but I think I can improve upon it. Mainly, I wish that I had held back less soap for the swirls. I always hold back too much. I should have either used maybe five ounces of soap each for the aqua and orange, or reserved less soap for the surface swirls. I was going for something a bit more subtle, although I think the end result is still pretty good.

And the scent is fabulous - lots of citrus with a bit of effervescence from the champagne notes.

I think it's a fun soap, sure to please any Dolphins fan. Or at least my husband.

It's only the beginning of the season, but so far so good for the Fins! I hope that they have a good season. No matter what happens on the field, though, at least we know that we'll have good soap.

Any Dolphins fans out there? Sports fans in general? Have you made or bought any sports-themed soaps?

Gumball Soap

So, a few months ago I picked up a bunch of one-ounce sampler fragrance oils from Nature's Garden. One of the scents I bought was their Bubble Luscious FO. Out of the bottle, it smells to me just like pink bubble gum, and the scent stays true in soap, too.

Sometimes you can smell a scent and know right away how you want to soap it. Other times, you have to think on the design for a bit. And sometimes you know what you want your soap to look like and you have to find a scent to go along with your plan.

With this fragrance, I saw colorful gumballs embedded in a white soap. A few years ago, I picked up this ice cube mold at a kitchen store and had yet to use it. This mold makes cylinders of ice for water bottles, but it's great for soap, too! I figured I would use it to make cylinders of melt-and-pour soap and embed them in my cold process soap. When cut, the soap tubes will look round, like gumballs!

Soap balls would have also worked great for this project, but I didn't have the energy to make a batch of CP soap and roll it into soap balls. I thought about using my silicone ball molds (Bramble Berry carries them in small, medium, and large sizes), but since I had only two of them I decided to use the ice cube mold instead.

Melt-and-pour embeds

I confess that I am lazy when it comes to making CP embeds. Oftentimes I don't feel like making a batch just for embeds, requiring two days of soaping to complete one project. And other times I just fail to plan ahead. I tell myself that one day I should just make an extra pound of soap when I'm already soaping, separate it out, color and scent it, and make some embeds for a future project and also gee whiz was that so hard? Trouble is that I never remember to do that, or I don't have enough time, or I don't know what kind of embeds I want for what kind of project, blah, blah, blah. So CP embeds just never seem to happen for me. At least, not so far.

But melt-and-pour soap offers flexibility, and embeds can be made quickly and easily with it. So, M&P was my go-to for embeds once I planned this gumball soap out in my head.

For my embeds, I chose clear M&P base and Fizzy Lemonade, Tangerine Wow, and Electric Bubble Gum neon colorants from Bramble Berry. (Tip: These pigments are best mixed with glycerin to work out the clumps before adding them to the soap. Don't disperse them in rubbing alcohol - it doesn't work.)

I chopped up the M&P, covered my container with plastic wrap to prevent the moisture from evaporating, and nuked it in the microwave for 30-second bursts until melted. Then I added my colorant and poured the soap into the ice cube mold. Because I had only one ounce of the fragrance oil, I didn't scent my M&P embeds. But I totally would have if I had had more FO. (Another tip: There is one cylinder in the center of the mold that does not have an open bottom. It's got this crisscross design instead, making it impossible to get the soap out. Avoid that particular cylinder. I had to soak my mold in water for, like, an entire day before the soap disintegrated enough for me to remove it. I don't know why it's like that or what it contributes to the mold - stability, maybe? - but there must be a reason for it. Just wanted to give you a heads-up.)

Ideally, I would have made my embeds the day before and allowed the soap to cool overnight. Of course, I didn't do that, so I was pressed for time. After pouring the M&P, I put the mold in the freezer for about 30 minutes or so to make the soap harden faster.

After I put the M&P in the freezer, I made my CP soap. I opted for a one-pound batch using a palm-free recipe from The Nova Studio Blog. I used the first recipe listed, which uses 40% vegetable shortening, 30% olive oil, 28% coconut oil, and 2% castor oil. If you give this recipe a go, make sure you read the vegetable shortening label carefully! Some shortening contains palm oil, which would totally defeat the purpose if you're trying to go palm-free. Look for a soybean/cottonseed blend. (SoapCalc has "Crisco, old" on their list of oils, and I used that to run the recipe using soybean/cottonseed shortening through their lye calculator.)

I added the FO to the cooled base oils, along with some titanium dioxide dispersed in glycerin to whiten the soap.

By the time my CP soap was ready, the M&P was due to come out of the freezer. Once the soap was hard, I partially pushed it out with my thumb and gripped it with a paper towel to pull it the rest of the way out. I also used said paper towel to dab away the condensation on the surface of the soap.

When the CP and M&P soaps were both ready to go, I poured enough CP soap into my loaf mold to create a base to nestle a few cylinders of M&P end-to-end. I covered the embeds with more CP, and then laid some more embeds. I did three layers of embeds total, and topped the loaf off with the end pieces I had trimmed from the M&P cylinders.

Here is a video of the process:


I placed the soap in the freezer overnight to avoid gel phase because I feared that the M&P soap might melt if it gelled. I also soaped cool - around 95 degrees F.

The fragrance oil and the recipe behaved beautifully. The trace was nice and slow, and the scent is strong. And I'm happy to report that this FO does not discolor. Sweet scents often contain vanilla, which can cause the soap to discolor brown. But this FO has a 0% vanillin content, and it stayed nice and white!

And I love Bramble Berry's neon colorants! The colors are so bold and bright, and they really pop against the white.

The soap held up fairly well in the shower. I worried that skipping gel phase might cause the embeds to not adhere as well. Once the soap got worn down and became thinner and more pliable, a couple of embeds came loose near the end of the bar's life. No biggie for me, though.

Have you combined melt-and-pour with cold process soap before? How did you like it?