Every once in a while, a question comes up in the soapmaking world that seems to require everyone to choose a side.
Is melt-and-pour really soapmaking?
My answer is probably not nearly controversial enough.
If you enjoy making melt-and-pour soap, make melt-and-pour soap.
Seriously. Have fun.
There are beautiful, creative things you can do with melt-and-pour soap, and it can be a wonderfully approachable way to start experimenting with soap design, fragrance, color, molds, embeds, and all sorts of other fun things.
But melt-and-pour and making soap from scratch are different processes. And understanding that difference is useful—especially when you’re looking for instructions, troubleshooting a problem, or deciding what ingredients and colorants to use.
What Is Melt-and-Pour Soap?
With melt-and-pour, the actual soapmaking chemistry has already happened before you buy the base. Someone else has combined fats with an alkali and created soap. The resulting product is formulated so you can melt it again, customize it, and pour it into molds.
That means you don’t have to handle sodium hydroxide. You don’t have to formulate a recipe or calculate your lye. And you don’t have to wait for oils and lye to go through the process of becoming soap.
You’re starting with soap that has already been made.
When I make cold process soap, on the other hand, I start with oils, sodium hydroxide, and a liquid. I decide which oils to use and in what percentages. I control the water, superfat, additives, colorants, temperature, and process.
Then chemistry gets involved.
That’s the part I find fascinating… I GET to do all the things you DON’T do in melt and pour.
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So… Does Melt-and-Pour Count as Soapmaking?
This is where people can get surprisingly worked up.
You will sometimes hear that melt-and-pour isn’t “real” soapmaking because the soap itself was manufactured before the maker received it. Technically, yes, somebody else performed the original saponification. But I’m not particularly interested in being the Soap Police.
If someone buys a melt-and-pour base, creates a beautiful bar, gives it to their friends, and proudly says, “Look at the soap I made!” I cannot imagine anything useful being accomplished by popping out from behind a bush and yelling, “ACTUALLY…”
There are different ways to make things. There are also different reasons for making them.
For some people, the joy is in formulation and chemistry. For someone else, it may be creating intricate designs. Someone may want a project they can safely do with their kids. Someone else may simply want an easy way to make a pretty bar of soap on Saturday afternoon.
Those are all perfectly good reasons to make something.
Why I Don’t Make Melt-and-Pour Soap
My own interest has always been in making soap from scratch. I want to know what the oils are doing. I want to understand why changing an ingredient changes the finished soap. I want to play with water amounts, temperatures, additives, and techniques.
And, as anyone who has spent approximately five minutes around Soapy Friends already knows, I am completely fascinated by what happens when we try to get color out of plants and convince it to survive the soapmaking process. That is my particular flavor of soapmaking nerdiness.
It doesn’t mean everybody else’s soapmaking has to look like mine.
It does mean that most of what I teach here at Soapy Friends is going to be about making soap from scratch and about working with natural ingredients and botanical colors.
What Is Actually in Melt-and-Pour Soap Base?
This is one area where I think it’s important not to make sweeping statements.
There are lots of melt-and-pour bases available, and they aren’t all formulated the same way.
So rather than telling you that melt-and-pour soap is “natural,” “synthetic,” “chemical,” “clean,” or any of the other labels people like to attach to ingredients, I would encourage you to do exactly what I encourage soapmakers to do with everything else:
Read the ingredient list.
- What oils were used to make the soap?
- What other ingredients are in the base?
- Are there ingredients you don’t recognize? Look them up.
- Most importantly, think about why you are making your own soap in the first place.
If your goal is complete control over every ingredient that goes into your soap, starting with a premade base may not give you the level of control you’re looking for.
If your goal is to have fun creating beautiful handmade soaps without formulating from scratch or handling sodium hydroxide, a melt-and-pour base may be exactly what you’re looking for.
Neither answer needs to be everybody’s answer.
Can You Use Natural Colorants in Melt-and-Pour Soap?
Absolutely. And this is where things get really interesting.
My Soapy Friend Minal Doshi experimented with a wonderful collection of botanical colorants in melt-and-pour soap, including cutch, yellow dock, sappanwood, indigo, ironwood, laccifer lacca resin, alkanet root, and Himalayan rhubarb.
Her experiments are a great reminder that botanical colorants don’t necessarily behave the same way in melt-and-pour as they do in cold process soap.
Why?
Because when you add a botanical to cold process soap, you’re putting it into a very alkaline environment while saponification is occurring. Plant pigments can respond dramatically to pH, heat, extraction method, concentration, and the other ingredients in the recipe.
With melt-and-pour, that soapmaking reaction has already taken place.
Botanical color experiments in melt-and-pour soap by Soapy Friend Minal Doshi. Minal tested a wonderful range of natural colorants to see how they behaved in a melt-and-pour base.
That doesn’t mean botanical colors are automatically predictable in melt-and-pour. Far from it. But it does mean you’re working in a different environment.
If you’re experimenting with a new botanical colorant, my quick method for testing natural colors before making soap can also help you understand how dramatically a plant color may react to an alkaline environment.
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Dispersing Natural Colorants in Melt-and-Pour
Another important difference is how you prepare the colorant before adding it.
If an instruction simply tells you to “disperse the colorant,” my next question is always:
Disperse it in what? Oil? Water? Alcohol? Glycerin?
The answer depends on the material you’re using and what you’re actually trying to accomplish.
With botanical ingredients, we may not simply be trying to suspend little particles evenly throughout the soap. We may actually be trying to extract the compounds responsible for the color.
That’s an important distinction.
I explain this much more thoroughly in How to Disperse Soap Colorants: Oil, Water, Alcohol, and More, including why I don’t think “always disperse powders in oil” is particularly useful advice.
What About Mica in Melt-and-Pour Soap?
Mica and other manufactured colorants are commonly used in melt-and-pour soap, and the same advice applies here that I give for any manufactured colorant: start with the manufacturer’s instructions for the specific product you’re using.
Depending on the colorant and the type of soap you’re making, the supplier may recommend adding it directly or dispersing it first. In melt-and-pour, alcohol is also commonly used to disperse powdered colorants without adding much extra oil to the soap base.
Know what you’re buying, make sure it’s appropriate for the intended cosmetic application, and follow the recommendations from a reputable supplier rather than assuming one rule applies to every powdered colorant.
What If I Use Mica, Fragrance Oils, or Melt-and-Pour? Am I Welcome at Soapy Friends?
Yes.
I think this is worth saying clearly because Soapy Friends has a pretty obvious natural-soapmaking bent.
You do not have to make soap exactly the way I make soap to be a Soapy Friend.
You don’t have to use botanical colors.
You don’t have to use essential oils.
And you don’t have to make every bar from scratch.
I happen to enjoy working with natural colorants and essential oils because those are the ingredients that interest me. If scent is something you’d like to experiment with too, I’ve shared more about how I approach testing essential oil blends for handmade soap.
But choosing fragrance oils instead doesn’t somehow make your soap less worthy of being called handmade soap.
You should know what you’re walking into, though. 😆
Most of the education I create—and much of the collective experience in the Soapy Friends community—is centered around making soap from scratch, understanding the chemistry behind it, and experimenting with natural ingredients and botanical colors.
So if you come into the group wondering why your cold process soap suddenly seized, why your beautiful purple botanical turned brown, or what happened when you changed the water in your recipe…
Oh, we can nerd out about that for DAYS.
If you’re trying to choose between seventeen shades of sparkly purple mica, we may not be your most useful group of people.
And that’s okay.
There are soapmaking communities that specialize in all sorts of different things. Finding people who are excited about the same part of the craft that excites you makes the whole experience more fun.
There Is No Prize for Making Soap the Hardest Way Possible
Soapmakers sometimes create rules for themselves.
- Only natural colors.
- Only essential oils.
- No palm oil.
- No animal fats.
- Only local ingredients.
- Only botanicals grown beneath a full moon while a goat named Beatrice supervises.
Okay, I made that last one up.
But here’s the important part:
Those are choices, not measures of how good a soapmaker you are.
I have my own preferences because they make soapmaking more interesting to me. I love natural colors because they’re unpredictable. I love understanding the chemistry because knowing why something happened helps me become a better soapmaker.
Those preferences shape what I teach. They don’t need to become rules for you.
If melt-and-pour makes you happy, make melt-and-pour.
If you love fluorescent mica and fragrance oil that makes your entire house smell like blueberry pancakes, have at it.
If you want to grow madder root, extract its pigments, change your water amount, track your temperatures, compare gelled and ungelled samples, and then spend three months wondering why Batch Number Four is slightly more orange than Batch Number Three… Come sit by me. We have notes.
Make the soap you want to make. And, learn enough to make it safely and intentionally.
And please, for the love of bubbles, have fun.
Continue Learning with Soapy Friends
However you choose to make soap, understanding what your ingredients are doing makes experimenting a whole lot more interesting.
If you’d like to continue learning and soaping along with me, here are a few great next steps:
Learn how different colorants need different preparation: Read How to Disperse Soap Colorants: Oil, Water, Alcohol, and More to understand the difference between dispersing a powder and extracting color from a botanical.
Experiment before committing to a whole batch: Try my quick method for testing natural colors before making soap to see how botanical ingredients react in an alkaline environment.
New to making soap from scratch? The free Soapy Friends Starter Kit includes beginner-friendly lessons and practical resources to help you understand what you’re doing instead of simply following a recipe.
And if natural colorants and the chemistry behind handmade soap are the parts that make you want to pull up a chair and start taking notes, you’ll find plenty more of that inside Soapy Friends.
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