There are many variants for soap colorants – Photo courtesy of Flickr user necrocake.
Do you want to learn how to make soap at home?
There are many different ways you can make soap and sometimes you want to have colored soaps for more variety. Soap colorants give your homemade soap a unique look and there are numerous ways you can color soap.
Most soap colorant in the soaps you buy in the store is made with synthetic dyes and other chemicals. This article focuses more on natural dyes for your homemade soap, but for our full, comprehensive guide to soap colorants please click here.
Soap Colorant
As a homemade soap maker you can use synthetic dyes if you want, the choice is really yours but most people who are looking for homemade soap are health conscious and they are more apt to buy soap from you if you go with all natural ingredients as your soap colorant.
You can get amazing results with natural dyes and you don’t need to go the synthetic route to get soap that people buy. The best soap making advice I can give you is to try the natural dyes and see how things turn out. Of course you’ll need some practice but this is part of the learning process when you make your own soap.
Homemade Soap Colorant
You have numerous choices when it comes to soap making colorants form natural dyes. Many common products we use every day can be turned into a great dye for soap.
Light Dark Brown Soap
You have several choices to make this color soap. To get a brown shade to your soap try black walnut hull, ground cloves, all spice, or nutmeg.
Yellow Soap
For a yellow shade try safflower powder, turmeric, annatto seeds, and calendula petals.
Green Soap
To make soap green use burdock leaf, comfrey leaf, dandelion leaf, or French Green Clay
Red Soap
For red soap use madder root, sandalwood powder, or Moroccan red clay
Purple Soap
For purple soap try alkanet root.
What to Expect
Your soap won’t have the vibrant colors you see when you buy store bought soap but you can get some nice shades in your soap. You’ll need to practice to get the hang of it but once you start using natural soap colorants you will want keep using them. This is a great way to give your customers something unique in your soap and the fact that you use “natural dyes” is a good selling point for your soap.
Also, you should keep in mind that the shade of these colors can drastically change from recipe to recipe. The final results depend on which oils and fats are used, whether or not you decide to allow your soap to gel, how the soap dye reacts to lye, and sometimes which essential oils or fragrances make up the soap’s scent.
Advice
More advice on how to make soap: go over your list of soap colorants you plan to use and see which ones could be known allergens for people. You might not want to use these as colorants or you can mark on the soap that it might be an allergen for some people. Be sure you don’t use colorants that have harsh smells or could cause irritation to the skin.
Work with various colors and just see what you can come up with. It can be frustrating at first to get the color you want. YouTube is a good source of information on soap colorants and how to get them to look the way you want. There’s some great videos there that will walk you through the process of making the soap and then adding in your colors with natural ingredients.
Other Soap Colors
The list above is just a small sampling of the many soap colorants you can use (please click here to see our full, comprehensive guide to soap colorants). A quick search online should bring you many more choices for your soap color. Once you find a few that you like you can make them all the time or experiment with new scents and colors in your soap. You can add in herbs and spices to make your soaps unique too and give them amazing smells.
Over to you: do you have any favourite ingredients used as soap colorants? Let us know in the comments below and share your favourite tricks for how to make soap with our readers!
Take the next step
Make sure you download our FREE comprehensive beginners guide, ‘How To Make Soap At Home’, by clicking here.
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