Glycerin Soap Formulation Tips

Here are some tips for improving your glycerin soap:

1. Increasing Soap Hardness

To make your glycerin soap bar harder, you can add Sodium Lactate. Sodium Lactate is known to help solidify bar soap and also acts as a humectant, helping to retain moisture in the skin. You can add Sodium Lactate at a concentration of 1-5% of your total soap batch. Since Sodium Lactate is typically sold as a liquid solution (like the 60% liquid version), you can incorporate it directly into the water phase of your soap making process. The softening after 6 days might be due to the humectant nature of glycerin itself, attracting moisture from the environment. Using Sodium Lactate should help mitigate this effect by increasing the overall hardness of the bar.

2. Preventing Color Bleeding

Water-soluble food coloring can indeed bleed, especially in humid bathroom environments, as it is designed to dissolve in water. To prevent this, you should switch to colors designed for use in soap and cosmetics that are not water-soluble dyes. The EasyMix and ReadyMix color ranges are suitable alternatives. These colors are typically pigments that are dispersed in a base (like oil or silicone) rather than dissolved in water. This makes them much more stable in soap and less likely to migrate or bleed when the soap gets wet.

3. Choosing Silver Glitter Size

The choice of silver glitter size depends on the desired visual effect in your glycerin soap. The glitter sizes available, such as B, C, and D, refer to the particle size (microns).

• Size B (around 60-80 microns) provides a shimmer effect.
• Size C (around 150 microns) is suitable for a more noticeable sparkle.
• Size D (around 250-350 microns) provides a "super sparkle" or larger glitter effect.

For a clear, visible sparkle in your soap, sizes C or D would be more suitable as they have larger particle sizes that catch the light more effectively than the smaller B size.