Shea Butter Soap Base 1kg

01 · TEN OR TWELVE BARS PER KILO

What the block gives

A normal-sized bar of soap runs to 80-100 g, so the kilo gives you ten or twelve, depending on the mould you use.

You cut the block to whatever you are going to use: what you do not melt keeps as it is, so there is no need to work the whole kilo at once.

02 · HONEY SWEATS

The limit nobody mentions

Honey is hygroscopic: it pulls water out of the air. A melt-and-pour soap with too much honey sweats — beads appear on the surface within days — and stays softer than it should.

The proportion that works is on the order of one teaspoon per 500 g of base. And once cut, the bars get wrapped: left in the open, a honey soap sweats again however well you dosed it.

03 · MELT, DON'T BOIL

And when the additives go in

It melts in a bain-marie, never boiling. Overheating yellows the base, drives off water — the bar shrinks and hardens — and takes the aromas with it.

Essential oils go in with the base off the heat and below 60 °C, or they evaporate before reaching the mould. As a guide they are dosed at around 1-3 % of the weight of the base: 10 to 30 g a kilo, always respecting what the supplier of each oil states.

Propolis tincture brings its own colour and smell: expect an amber or brown soap, not a white one.

04 · THE ALCOHOL, TWICE

One trick with two uses

Spraying alcohol over the freshly poured surface knocks out the bubbles sitting on top. That is the use everyone knows.

The second is what saves a two-colour soap: if you are pouring a second layer, spray the first one just before so they bond. Without that, the layers separate when you turn the soap out.

05 · BEFORE YOU BUY

This is the 1 kg block: