Bath products were not part of the plan.
As stated a few times around this site, our main focus has always been on the bees. Honey was definitely an expected byproduct, but the beeswax we have slowly started to accrue was not something we had considered. Only recently have we begun to explore the different uses of beeswax, but I can already tell it’s the start of an interesting journey.
I feel obligated to mention chapstick, as it was the first step. Melting down beeswax and adding it to a handful of oils and butters was certainly rewarding. It seemed difficult to go wrong, and even our first efforts were met favorably. We’re currently refining our recipe and experimenting with different flavors, and we expect to have tubes ready-to-go for (whenever we get around to) our first booth showing. However, emboldened by this early success, we felt compelled to push things further. That took us to soap making.
Soap making is deceptively simple. At first glance, it’s like following any other recipe. However, whereas lip balm involves simply melting down, mixing, and then pouring the ingredients; soap making involves calculations and hazardous chemicals. There’s danger! There’s experimentation to be done! It’s a strange combination of working at the lab bench, but doing so in your kitchen.
Lye. Let’s just get this out of the way. It’s dangerous. Like… blind-you-if-you-get-it-in-your-eyes dangerous. At first, I was mostly worried about chemical burns, but then I added lye to water for the first time and watched in amazement as it measured over 200F on the thermometer. Lye won’t just burn you. It’ll double-burn you! But you need it.
Without going into too much detail, lye and oils undergo a chemical reaction (called saponification) to create soap. If everything goes smoothly, there’s no lye leftover. It has all been converted to soap. The interesting bit is how that soap behaves, based on the oil(s) you used to create it.
In keeping with the conservation mindset that beekeeping seems to have intensified in us, all of our soaps will be palm oil free. As beginners, this is somewhat of an issue, because many soap recipes call for the use of palm oil. The silver lining is that we’ve taken a “they’re more like guidelines” approach to these recipes and started experimenting with substituting other oils for palm oil, or simply creating our own recipes without it. So long as we’re mindful of our lye calculations, we won’t miss the palm oil, and neither will you.
We’re only four batches in, but these early tests have been informative. It’s incredible what adding even a tablespoon of honey will do to a batch of soap. You can expect to see future articles detailing our discoveries, with the successful stories no-doubt ending up on our Products page.
