For all you soapmakers who are looking for something new!
I've been making salt bars on occasion lately. I really like them. What you do is you add a pound of salt for every pound of fat and oil that is in your soap recipe. Add the salt slowly as you stir to your traced soap. Sometimes I don't get the entire pound in before the soap starts to harden, but it turns out great anyway! I recommend that you do this with a 100% coconut recipe, since coconut will still lather despite the salt. I tried it once with Palm Kernel Oil and had a mess. You can use 10 -15% of some kind of nourishing oil in the recipe as well, but remember it will cut back on the lather.
This works very well with cold process soap. I found that in hot process soap it moves way to fast and it's hard to get it into the mold quick enough, but it's not impossible. I've never tried it with rebatching soap, but I don't see why it wouldn't work if it works well with Hot Process.
The finished bar is VERY hard. It hardens very quickly!! Don't use a FO that accelerates trace. You need to cut the bars as soon as you can safely get the soap out of the mold or you will not be able to cut them at all!!
A lot of people LOVE this soap on their skin. The salt is gently exfoliating and creates a very slick feeling on your skin. If you find that this soap is too harsh on your skin, it's really great on soap scum!!
Make a small batch and see what you think of them or you can dmail me and we can do a trade (swap a bar of soap).
ETA:
Some soapers bars are not exfoliating, I have made some that are and some that aren't. HP salt bars are exfoliating. I just saw a bar that was only 50% coconut oil. So it sounds like you can really be flexible with your recipe! I noticed that the 100% coconut bars I did cold process got HOT in the mold! So be careful!
This message was edited Jul 18, 2007 10:55 AM
