Customer Reviews

Making Transparent Soap: The Art Of Crafting, Molding, Scenting & Coloring

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is an essential guide for anyone wishing to make transparent soap. The author guides you seamlessly through the complex soap making process with step-by-step instructions color photos & a very helpful troubleshooting section.

The book starts out detailing the properties, advantages & disadvantages of each soap ingredient. Then safety precautions & equipment selection are outlined, including selecting a mold.

Two methods for making the soap & 8 vegetable-based soap recipes follow. Conveniently, complete instructions for modifying these & formulating your own original recipes are included as well. Adding dyes & fragrances is also discussed. Several essential oil fragrance formulas are included.

I was very impressed that the book included both instructions & complete plans in for making labor-saving tools including a square wooden soap mold, an adjustable-wire bar cutter & drill mixer. The extensive resource list including websites was also invaluable.

I bought this book for myself. I read it over several times and became very familiar with the process before attempting anything. The book is extremely informative and well-written. Very easy to understand. The description of ingredients and the purpose of each one was very useful. Beautiful pictures. Nice sections on coloring, fragrancing & moulding. Great info. on where ingredients can be purchased. However, even though I followed the directions for the alcohol/lye method to the letter, I still had a disastrous first experience. My mixture, simmering on lowest possible heat, boiled up and oozed out the sides, despite the tightly cinched bungee holding the sheets of plastic in place. My inner pot ended up floating on boiling soap foam. I managed to save the remainder that was left in the pot and finished the simmering proccess directly on the burner (after cleaning the outside of the pot thoroughly). I estimated the amount of sugar/water solution and glycerin to add to it. Although I can't vouch for the amounts of any of the ingredients at this point, the stuff that I did save managed to come out very well. Looks pretty, smells great and lathers beautifully. I'm just lucky my stove top didn't burst into flames considering the flamable alcohol that oozed over the sides of the pot. I believe next time I try this (soon) I will ajust the method to what I consider safe and hope that it works well. If you plan on making this soap, please be sure to have an extinguisher close by. I'm not sure why I had such a horrible time with this method, but I'd hate for it to be worse for anyone else.

Ever read a soap box label? Ever wondered what all that stuff in soap does, why it's there? This book is very good at explaining what the components do, how they contribute to lather, if they dry or moisturize skin, etc. I found the information helpful even if I don't ever actually make my own soap (but I think now I want to try).

This book is very good at teaching the beginner the basics of what exactly goes into soap making. It details the different choices and weighs the good with the bad. I would have liked to have seen more ideas about different recipes for the scents, but oh well. All in all, anyone interested in soap making should read this book for it's educational value!

I always wanted to know how to make my own soap. At first I thought this is gona be the hardest thing. when in reality it's the easiest. This book takes you through a step by step process. and in the end you will end up having the most beautiful looking soap. so nice you'll be tempted to sell it.

This book is fun to look at. It book is clear and well written in making transparent soap with alcohol from scratch. However, this is not the only way to make transparent soap, and the author fails to provide the alternative. Soap made with alcohol dries your skin, and it cannot be remelted for m&p project. Finding the alcohol for the recipe is also a pain. If this book had the recipe of how to make clear m&p soap base, it would be the ultimate transparent soap book!

I found the first version of this book in my public library and fell in love with it when they got in the second I scrambled to be the first on the holds list and after perusing it and not wanting to give it up, purchased my own. The pictures in this book are amazing and extremely helpful. Using them as a guide I have made some beautiful bars of transparent soap that feel as good as they look. My soaps were clearer than any purchased glycerin soap or transparent melt and pour soap I have ever worked with. Additionally, the bars were harder and longer lasting than any other transparent bar (and many regular CP or HP) bars I have ever used. Failor's book offers more than just recipes and instructions for soap, but also information on how to cut, color, and shape your soap, nifty machines you can make to cut labor down, and other odds and ends that are especially helpful if you plan to manufacture larger amounts of soap.

With that said, this is not a book for beginners. I cannot stress this enough. Get a firm grasp of cold or hot process soapmaking, including getting a few successful batches under your belt, before you endeavor to make transparent soap.

Additionally, transparent soap is not the same thing as melt and pour soap. Melt and pour soap is a completely different process and requires specially manufactured soap bases that have a low melting point enabling creative soapers to do very creative things that may not be possible with cold, hot, or one of the many other soap making processes. Throw your transparent soap into the microwave to melt it and you'll end up with one very bubbly mess.

A truly generous teacher who doesn`t keep little secrets to herself. Sometimes you`ll have to re-read things more than once ( the secret parts other authors don`t want to teach us) but this is because she really has done her research on every single item and can teach you to do everything she says. She`s one of my heroes.

It is a full color book with attractive picture in every page. It contains not too detail information but quite educative. The book well written and easy to understand. Inside you will find out how certain ingredients affect the result of the soap, the tools you need, the ingredients, the every step of making the soap also there is troubleshooting and raw ingredients resources. It is a must read books before someone try to make their first transparent soap.

I bought this book several years ago and it is the best soap-making book I've found. The instructions are simple and easy to follow and the different ingredients used are explained perfectly. I had made soap many times before I bought this book and I used to use the cold-process method. My soap was good, but it takes several weeks for cold-process soap to complete it's chemical reaction. After it's cured, if it is stored for any length of time it shrinks and so it doesn't look as good then. Also, the cold-process soaps I made tended to be somewhat soft and would be used up rather quickly. All of those problems disappeared with the soaps made from this book's recipes. The recipes call for alcohol. After experimenting with several kinds of alcohol, I settled on using EverClear. It smells good in the soap, and doesn't dry the skin, contrary to what one might think. The EverClear costs more than the cheapest vodka, but the results are dramatically better. When I went to the Chemical store (it's in the city where I live) to buy the scents and bulk supplies, the chemist said that clear soap can't be made at home because it had to cooked under pressure and that it would take a genius to figure out how to do it. He wanted to sell me the melt-and-pour soap base, and I felt like he'd challenged me, so I went home and made transparent soap with this book and it turned out great. Yes, the soap is cooked under pressure, but all it takes is following the instructions in the book where a sheet of plastic is bungeed over the soap-making pot and that pot is placed inside a bigger pot of boiling water. After cooking for a time, the soap is poured into molds and is ready to use as soon as it cools and hardens. This is the hot-process and the soap is very thin when it is ready to be poured into the molds. This makes it very easy to mold well (no tapping out air pockets) but your molds must be water-tight. Regular soap molds work well, but home-made loaf-type molds need to be lined so they don't leak. My sister has the first book I bought and won't give it back, so I am buying another one.