Soap Stop and Body Shop

Prepare for Gilmore Girls weekend! September 18th-20th Soap Stop will be an official mug dealer! Come pick up your mug for $15 before the 19th and you’ll be able to participate in our coffee crawl. Not only will we be serving coffee to those that participate, but so will a host of other downtown stores. For more information on this event, you can visit the website linked below!

https://ggseurekaevents.com/

Oil delivery day! This is the reason I can’t just make the soap in the store; we go through about 2 of these a week from May-November, and one a week the rest of the year. Our production warehouse has a dock and all the space we need to work with large batches!

Y’all have asked for bubble bath, so you shall receive it. Just know this about it…bubble bath is great as an occasional treat, but the agents that create bubbles also dry your skin out. Counter this with an excellent moisturizer after you get out!

We make almost all of our items from scratch, but I hate working with SLS (the bubbling agent), so I bought a base that was already properly balanced and preserved, and we just add our own signature fragrances to it. We’re starting with Black Raspberry Vanilla, Fifty Shades, Cotton Candy, and Goddess. I have enough to make one more kind and I’m taking suggestions!

I just noticed the gap on the ingredient label when I uploaded this. That isn’t a missing ingredient; it is apparently where the paragraph switched when I copy and pasted the ingredients from the manufacturer…I will fix that tomorrow. 🤦‍♀️ Oh yeah…we even make all of our own labels! 🤣

A duck knocked off a lemonade stand…

https://www.eurekasoapstop.com/product/got-any-grapes-hp-soap-bar/CWIZOKGH33KBESULEKWRZUJG

When you feel like grabbing your backpack and hitching a ride out of here, reach for this “out of this world” grapefruit and mint coconut oil soap.

Why did I made it this atrocious color? Let’s just say this was a design plan that went wrong. Occasionally I like to practice my cold process skills just to keep them sharp, and on this day…they weren’t. 🤣 This fragrance oil “seized”, which means that it reacted with the batter in a way that made it immediately almost impossible to mold, so I chucked it in the mold in blobs, and this is what we get. It’s ugly, but it smells amazing! It’ll probably also glow under a blacklight if you are washing at a rave.

Enjoy!

~Kendra

I’ve been tinkering with something I saw in a booth somewhere, and I actually love these little lotion dots. The little single use pellets of mango butter, sweet almond oil, and beeswax serve as both a solid lotion and a solid fragrance. If you have missed our lotion bars, I think you’ll love these; swapping the shea butter for mango butter, which absorbs faster, and adding arrowroot powder to reduce the greasy feel has made a product superior to our old lotion bars in my opinion. The arrowroot also keeps the dots from sticking together.

To use, just crush one in your hand and use as you would any lotion, body butter, or solid cologne. Because these are anhydrous (don’t contain any water) they can be made in virtually a synthetic or natural fragrance without needing a preservative, so we’ll have all-natural versions of these…which is hard to find in a lotion.

Look for several kinds in the store and online by the weekend, and let us know if there is a particular fragrance you’d like us to make.

~Kendra

I have recently had frequent requests for tallow soap. I had some that I rendered from a steer we had processed, so I made a couple of loaves.

Tallow is technically fat rendered from mutton or beef, but the tallow that is best for the skin is a specific kind of fat called “suet” which is the hard fat found primarily around the kidneys and organs. The softer fat trimmed from roasts and steaks is technically “tallow”, but it is very different from the suet that makes good skincare products. Look for products made from suet when using tallow in your skincare routine.

I used suet that I rendered myself for this soap, and it has a lot of great properties that make it a historical favorite in soap. It creates a hard, mild bar to which most skin reacts favorably. If you are used to using our soap, however, you will notice some differences. Tallow does not lather well on its own, so I added 25% coconut oil. Even so, it is not going to lather up like our other soaps, which is why I don’t use it in my primary recipe. Instead you are going to get a flat, but very silky slip. The lather that does come off it will be very creamy…much like a Castile. It’s not a powerfully cleansing bar, which means you will not want to use it to remove grease. While you can use many of our bars to wash dishes or to lift stains from clothes, tallow soap isn’t an oil buster like coconut oil soap is.

The blood orange essential oil gives it the light yellow color, and the swirls are Moroccan clay. It’s all natural and it smells amazing.

I only had enough left from our steer to make two loaves instead of a full batch, but if y’all like it and want us to keep making it, I’ll source suet and keep it going. For now, you can pick it up in store or online. Let me know what you think!

https://www.eurekasoapstop.com/product/all-natural-blood-orange-hp-soap-with-tallow/EKAOVCKEXD2RBV7VE5VGLQ7P?cp=true&sa=false&sbp=false&q=true

~Kendra

Good evening, Soap Fans!! Just dropping in to let y’all know that after a grueling fall of injuries and issues that held us up a little, we are back in full force!

Michelle is back and healing well from her surgery, and Grant is finally healed up enough to return to production. With three of us making product, you’ll see out of stock items restocking FAST this week, and by next week, we should be fully stocked. Starting tomorrow, our hours move back to 10-6 Sun-Thurs, and 10-7 on Fri/Sat, and our website is available 24/7.

We are also adding new and fun items and bringing back some old favorites this spring, so keep an eye on here and the website to see what all is in store. As ever, if you miss something we don’t have at the moment, hit us up and we’ll get it made for you!

More soon, but here is a little montage of what we have been working on this week! See y’all soon!

Since the snow kept us home today, I thought it would be fun to make single loaf batches of soap in my kitchen like the winter of 2014 when I got my first soap making setup. On a regular soaping day at the warehouse, I make four 50lb slabs, or about 400 bars a day with MUCH better equipment than I have at home, but I have been stacking up 2 ounce fragrance samples sent by our vendors, and today seemed like a fun day to try a few of those.

As you can see, my tiny crockpots were WAY too small for this project. When doing hot process, it is best to have a pot twice the size of your oils. When the soap heats, it can “volcano” or…basically…erupt from the pot and spew all over your kitchen. As the soap is both temperature and chemically HOT as HELL when this happens, it is much like lava. Ask me how I know…. I guess that must be why they call it a volcano.

Nevertheless, these pots are all I have, and over time I have learned how to precisely control my temps to keep this from happening…mostly. Still, once everything was in the pot, I watched it like a hawk as it was too close for comfort.

Everything worked just fine! I often get questions about how we get the rough tops, so I took some pictures along the way so y’all can see a little version of what the process looks like. First, I heat the oils until they are no longer cloudy. The white soap is a garden soap, so I added cranberry seeds to the oil, and since the Purple Rain was going to be a solid color, I went ahead and added the purple mica to the oil. If either were going to be 2 colors or more, then the coloring step would wait until a future step. In this tiny pot, there is no way I’m going to have room to swirl, so I just rolled with single colors.

After the color, I add the lye solution slowly while using a stick blender until it “traces” or starts to thicken. This is the point where the oil and lye are uniformly combined, and the point where the chemical magic begins. At trace, I add the fragrance or essential oil. Today, I had ”Spicy Tomato” and “Rain” samples to work with, so the Spicy Tomato went in the garden soap, and Rain into the purple batter.

Now I cover it TIGHTLY because I want to hold all the moisture in that I can. If steam can escape, then the batter dries out and is brittle and crumbly after the cook. It becomes hard to mold and the final product is very rough. Holding the moisture in the batter makes it almost pourable. Now it cooks. The heat forces the chemical reaction, called saponification, which is where the oil and lye react and become a completely new product…soap. After this process is complete, no lye remains. We do a 7.5% “superfat” which means that we add 7.5% more oil than the lye can react with, so the final bar is soap plus 7.5% moisturizing extra oils with no lye remaining.

How do we know when that happens? The soap changes consistency, called “gelling”. It becomes a translucent thick gel, which we then test in 2 ways to ensure it is complete. I used a PH strip today to show the difference in soap that has completed the chemical reaction vs. that which hasn’t. The purple strip is taken from ungelled Purple Rain, and as you can see in the next photo, after gel, the strip turns green.

That’s it! Then I scooped the batter into the mold, whacked the mold on the counter a couple of times to settle the batter into the mold and let it cool. This is how we get the tops…they form naturally when we tap the molds or slabs on the table to settle the batter. Tomorrow, I’ll take it out of the mold and it will be ready to cut when I get back to my good cutters. I forgot to bring a little cutter home, and all I have here are butcher knives…which you can use by the way. But I think I’ll hold out for the good cutter.

I’m going to do 2 more tomorrow…I have a sample called Crisp Apple Rose, which smells AMAZING, and….Ramen Noodle Soup fragrance. I don’t know about that one, but what the hell…it’s a snowday! I hope y’all enjoy the pictures of the very basic process. When we start classes, this where we will start…with single loaf, single color batches. This summer, we’ll hold a more advanced series.

Y’all let me know if you like posts like this or find them tedious!

~K