Making naturally white and black soap sounds simple enough. But black and white sit at opposite ends of the spectrum, which brings up a fun question: Are black and white actually colors?
The answer depends on whether you’re talking about light, pigments, or — because we’re soapmakers — soap.
When we’re talking about visible light, white is what we perceive when the wavelengths of visible light are combined, while black is the absence of visible light reaching our eyes. When we start working with pigments and physical materials, things get more complicated.
And then we put those pigments into soap, where we have oils with colors of their own, an alkaline environment, chemical reactions, gel phase, botanical colorants, and months of curing and aging. Suddenly, making something as seemingly simple as white soap or black soap gets pretty interesting.
But understanding white and black is about much more than making a pretty white or black bar of soap. These two colors can help you expand the breadth and depth of your entire natural soap color palette.
- Understanding white means understanding the natural color of your soap base. That base color affects every other color you put into your soap.
- Understanding black gives you another tool entirely. A bright, happy botanical color can be deepened just a little to become moodier and richer while still remaining within the same color family. Take it further, and those same color-blending principles can help you build deep, complex blacks.
So while white and black may not be traditional “colors,” they may be two of the most important colors to understand when you’re building a natural soap color palette.
That’s exactly why I wanted to explore both ends of the color spectrum with you during our Year of the Rainbow.
How to Make Naturally White Soap
If you want to make naturally white soap, one of the most important things to understand is that your soap already has a color before you add a single colorant.
Take a look at your oils: Some oils and butters are nearly white. Others are pale yellow, golden, green, or even orange. Once those ingredients are combined and turned into soap, their natural colors become the background for everything else you do.
That means making a naturally white soap often begins with formulation rather than colorant. And even if you have absolutely no interest in making white soap, this absolutely matters. If you add the same botanical colorant to a nearly white soap base and a naturally yellow soap base, you shouldn’t necessarily expect the same finished color. You’re essentially putting your color onto two different canvases.
That’s one of the fundamental concepts behind Natural Soap Color 101: know your base as well as your colorant.
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How Your Soap Recipe Affects White
A soap made predominantly with very pale oils can naturally cure to a much lighter color than one containing strongly colored oils or butters.
Even among oils that we casually think of as “light,” there can be noticeable differences in the finished soap. A formula may cure bright and pale, creamy ivory, warm beige, or slightly yellow.
None of those necessarily means there’s anything wrong with the soap. That’s simply the natural color of the formula.
This is also why copying someone else’s white-soap technique doesn’t guarantee that your soap will look exactly like theirs. If your base formulas are different, you aren’t necessarily starting with the same canvas.
Can Natural Colorants Make Soap Whiter?
This is where things get especially interesting. A natural additive such as kaolin clay can change the appearance of a soap, but it isn’t a magic white button.
Adding something pale or white to an already yellow soap doesn’t necessarily erase the underlying color. Depending on the formulation and additive, you may instead create a lighter, softer, creamier version of the original color. And sometimes that is absolutely beautiful.
The important distinction is between making a soap lighter and actually creating a naturally white soap.
If white is your goal, think about the entire formulation rather than expecting one ingredient to do all the work.
Tips for Making Naturally White Soap
- Start with your oils. If you’re aiming for a naturally white soap, choose your base oils with their natural colors in mind. Your recipe is your canvas.
- Don’t expect a perfect white from dark oils. A white clay or other pale additive isn’t necessarily going to overpower a strongly yellow, green, or otherwise deeply colored soap base.
- Understand gel phase. Gelled and ungelled soap can look noticeably different, particularly when you’re working with very pale colors. Gel can make colors appear deeper or more translucent, while avoiding gel can help some formulas remain lighter and more opaque. If you want to understand what is happening inside the mold, read Understanding the Gel Phase of Cold Process Soap Making.
- Pay attention to your water content. The amount of water in your soap affects more than how quickly the batter moves or how soon you can unmold it. Water content also influences the heat generated and retained during saponification, which can affect whether and how your soap gels. I explain that relationship in Water Content and Water Discounts in Handmade Soap.
- Remember that “white” has a range. Cream, ivory, warm white, and bright white are all useful parts of a natural soap palette. Don’t automatically treat a creamy soap as a failed white.
- Test your own formula. Your oils, additives, batch size, temperatures, and process all matter. A small test batch can tell you far more about your white soap than someone else’s photograph can.
How to Make Naturally Black Soap
Now let’s travel all the way to the other end of our soapmaking spectrum.
Black seems like it should be easy. Just add activated charcoal until the soap turns black, right?
Well…you can. But eventually you may discover that you’ve made a gorgeous black bar that produces gray lather and leaves your nice white washcloth looking like it volunteered for an experiment. 😆
Or, as I shared with members during our black soap class, you may make a charcoal soap that becomes a customer’s favorite — only to discover his wife won’t let him use it anymore because it leaves black residue all over the soap dish.
A beautiful soap still has to be a pleasant soap to use. Fortunately, more charcoal isn’t the only way to create a beautiful black soap.
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Activated Charcoal Can Create Different Blacks
One of my favorite things about working with natural soap colors is discovering just how many versions of one “color” there really are. Black is no exception.
Different activated charcoals can produce noticeably different results in soap. A hardwood activated charcoal and a coconut activated charcoal, for example, don’t necessarily create identical shades of black. And charcoal isn’t our only natural option.
Naturally dark clays and combinations of botanical colorants can give us still more possibilities, from smoky grays to softer blacks to rich, deep blacks with subtle undertones.
I’ve already done a much deeper dive into charcoal — including types of activated charcoal, usage rates, shades from gray through black, and how much is simply too much — in my guide to making charcoal soap.
A Better Black Soap Doesn’t Always Mean More Charcoal
Here’s where color theory becomes especially useful to soapmakers. Imagine adding black to a white background. It takes quite a bit of black to completely overwhelm that white. But what happens if your starting color is already blue, purple, red, green, or another color?
Instead of asking:
How much charcoal do I need to make this soap black?
Try asking:
What color am I starting with, and where do I want to take it?
Or, maybe you don’t want deep black at all. A small amount of charcoal can take a bright botanical color and deepen it, creating a moodier version that still clearly belongs to the original color family. Add more, and that colored base can become the foundation for a much deeper blended color.
This is the same principle I use when combining botanical colors in soap. We don’t have to think of every botanical colorant as an isolated ingredient. Once we understand what our colors do, we can start combining them intentionally.
That opens up an enormous range of possibilities — including black.
Tips for Making Naturally Black Soap
- Watch your lather. More charcoal may make the bar look darker, but that doesn’t necessarily make it a better soap. Test the finished bar and pay attention to the color of the lather and rinse water.
- Test the actual user experience. Use the soap at a sink. Put it on a soap dish. Try it with a light-colored washcloth. A dramatic black bar isn’t nearly as charming if it leaves everything around it gray or black.
- Explore different activated charcoals. Don’t assume every activated charcoal produces exactly the same black. The source and characteristics of the charcoal can affect the finished shade.
- Start with color instead of white. Try deepening an existing botanical color rather than asking charcoal to take a pale soap all the way to black. You may be surprised by how much depth you can create with less charcoal.
- Think beyond black. Charcoal is useful throughout your palette. A small amount can turn a bright color into a deeper, moodier version of itself without taking it all the way to black.
- Disperse powdered colorants properly. Charcoal and clays can clump or leave specks if they aren’t incorporated well. If you’re unsure what to use, see How to Disperse Soap Colorants: Oil, Water, Alcohol, and More.
White and Black Soap is More Complicated Than It Looks
White teaches us to look underneath our colorants and understand the canvas we’re working on.
Black teaches us how to add depth to that canvas.
To make a beautiful natural white soap, sometimes the most important color decision happens before you ever reach for a colorant. And to make a beautiful natural black soap, sometimes the answer isn’t adding more black at all.
Once you understand those two ideas, white and black stop being the oddballs sitting outside the rainbow. They become tools you can use throughout your entire natural soap color palette.
You can lighten, soften, deepen, mute, and transform colors much more intentionally because you’re no longer thinking only about which botanical makes which color. You’re thinking about how colors work together. And that’s when natural soap color gets really fun.
Want to See What Happens When We Test White and Black Soap?
During the Soapy Friends Year of the Rainbow, we’ve been spending 2026 working our way through natural soap colors one at a time.
For our white soap experiments, we explored how different formulations and natural approaches affected the finished color. Then we moved to the opposite end of the spectrum and explored different natural blacks before taking our color blending even further in the black classes.
And yes, we saved the samples. Lots and lots of little soaps. 🌈
The detailed experiments are where membership comes in. That’s where you’ll find the recipes, exact amounts, class demonstrations, replays, side-by-side comparisons, and our growing photo archives as the soaps cure and the colors continue to develop.
If you enjoy the experiments and articles I share publicly and find yourself thinking, “Okay, but I want to see what happened,” come join us.
Explore the Year of the Rainbow →
Or become a Soapy Friends member and join us for the experiments, classes, and soapmaking fun as we keep working our way through the rainbow.
Happy soaping, my friends! 🧼
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