Triple Butter Soap

Seems like every soap maker has a triple butter soap in their repertoire, and I’m no exception.

Triple butter soaps are popular because they have the benefits of three sumptuous butters and have great label appeal!

What butters to use?

Shea Butter is an obvious choice. It’s a staple in soap making, and for good reason! Shea butter creates a luxurious bar with an exotic appeal. We’ll use our Handcrafted Shea Butter for this soap.

Cocoa Butter is great in soap for many reasons, but one of my favorite reasons to use it is because it is a natural hardener. It can also speed up trace, so be prepared for that. Add 1 to 2 ounces as part of every pound of fats.

Mango Butter is a lovely oil that adds moisturizing properties to your soap.

It’s best to keep the usage rate of these butters lower to avoid an overly soft soap. Also, it really doesn’t take a lot of these luxury oils to bring their benefits to your soaps.

I’ll also add some Kaolin Clay to the oils to give the soap a sumptuous feel. Clay just does magical things to cold process soap! I’m going to use one of my favorite fragrances, Wild Mint & Ivy.

What You’ll Need

Instructions

Before getting started, please prepare to soap safely! Long sleeves, gloves, eye protection, and close-toed shoes are a must. If you have never made cold process soap before, we’re glad you’re here! Please check out this blog post, which is the first in a series on beginning soapmaking.

Weigh all the oils into a microwave-safe container; set aside.

Weigh the fragrance oil into a small glass container; set aside.

Weigh the lye.

Weigh the liquid you will be using. I’m going to use distilled water.

Slowly add the lye to the liquid, stirring. Do this in a well-ventilated area. It will give off toxic fumes that you do not want to inhale. Once the lye is completely dissolved, set the mixture aside to cool. After the lye solution has cooled, add the Sodium Lactate.

Pop the oils into the microwave to melt, using 30-second increments. Once they are completely liquid, set them aside to cool.

Oils before melting.

Adding lye solution to melted oils mixed with clay.

Here is your break to clean up your work space, set out the mold you will use, visit the rest room. Once the oils and the lye mixture are within 10 degrees of each other and have cooled to about 100 degrees F, you’re ready to make soap.

Add clay to oils and stick blend to combine.

Carefully pour the lye mixture into the oils, taking care not to splash. Stir with your soap spoon, then pulse the stick blender several times to emulsify the soap batter. Once I like the texture of the soap batter, I remove my stick blender and hand-stir the fragrance oil into the batter.

I chose not to color this soap, so it gets to go right into the prepared mold.

Adding Wild Mint & Ivy fragrance oil.

Pouring the soap into my 44-ounce loaf mold.

Notes

I find that using Sodium Lactate greatly improves my ability to get my soap out of the mold cleanly and (relatively) quickly. I highly recommend using it!

Using the full suggested water amount of 16 ounces resulted in some glycerin rivers in the soap, but I don’t mind those. I think they look kind of neat!