Mirror Glaze Soap Challenge April 2019

Hello every one! It’s time for another soap challenge with Amy Warden and Great Cakes Soap Challenge Club.  This month our challenge is to apply a baking technique called mirror glaze to our soaps.  This is a challenge for soap because we needed to keep our batter fluid enough to pour the glaze over the tops of our cakes or small muffins…and then make sure we didn’t scratch or damage the glaze before we got our pictures taken!

All of the colors and glitter that I used in this challenge are from Nurture Soaps who is our sponsor for this month’s challenge.  I love shopping at Nurture Soap’s website and their customer service is superb!  The colors I used in this challenge are: Neon Pink Florescent, Pink Vibrance, Neon Purple, Purple Vibrance, Blue Vibrance, Maya Gold and Shimmer Gold mixed, Neon Green and Alpine Green mixed, Winter White and Titanium Dioxide mixed, Black Oxide (used on the muffins).

The first step was to make the cake and muffins (which were used as a platform to heighten the flower bouquet). Let these set for 48 hours to unmold smoothly.  I used my basic soap recipe but I should have used cheaper oils for this cake as we will never cut it but use it for display…live and learn I guess. (Guess I missed a picture of the round muffins.)

During the wait, I started working on the flowers for the cake.  I tried piping some but that was a total failure so I used that batch for soap dough.  I already had the sculpting tools from previous challenges and my sister gave me her Wilton fondant kit which made the process very easy.  I made flowers for several days!

Once the cake came out of the mold it was time to start experimenting on the layout.  This took some time as I wanted to keep most of the top clear for the display of the glazing.  The below pictures were taken right after I poured the glaze, while it was still wet.  I saved all of the over-pour for soap dough. It made a beautiful lavender dough.

Next came the placement of the flowers on the glazed cake.  Wow, this was tedious!  I was so nervous placing the flowers and praying that I didn’t drop one on the glaze.  Alas, I DID drop a jar on the soap and had to hide the mark with the pink lily and swan.

To finish the muffins I cut into them and added salt crystals covered in mica and glitter (from Nurture Soap of course!) and then I dipped them in the clear melt and pour, also from Nurture Soap, and wished I had dipped them first and not over the salt.  Some of the muffins wouldn’t spin on the sticks and the M&P globed up around the crystals and cracked but overall I am very pleased with the way this challenge went together for me and with my results.

Until next time and happy soaping!

February 2019 Soap Challenge and SZN News

Hello everyone and thank you for joining us on our blog page.

Life has been kind of crazy for us at Skin Zen over the last year with changes to our focus market.  Things moved very fast as we changed our internal processes to gear up for the new business goals and challenges we faced.  Our increase in production is a direct result of our new Marketing Manager and Director who joined us in 2018, and we are pleased to welcome Shanelle and Dan Mayerhofer on our team. Shanelle and Dan have already implemented great ideas within the company and boosted our business and clientele tremendously since joining our team.  Looking forward to greater things to come for 2019!

It has been several months since I have had the time to make a new soap, so I decided to use the February 2019 Soap Challenge by Amy Warden from Great Cakes Soapworks and dedicate my weekend to creating a new custom soap for a wholesale order (one of five new wholesale orders!)  I am so grateful that Amy was able to bring the challenges back for the inspiration these events provide to soapers which push us to grow and experiment while making our products.

This month the challenge is Glycerin Rivers design and is inspired by soapmaker Clara Lindberg from Auntie Clara’s Handcrafted Cosmetics and her blog posts on glycerin rivers.  I have created glycerin rivers on previous challenges (here and here) but they were not intentional.  When I created the first soap with glycerin rivers I liked the effect they gave my soap, and I thought they complemented the design perfectly (January 2016 Soap Challenge blog for the Circling Taiwan Swirl.

Glycerin rivers are not actually glycerin but are non-pigmented (clear) “rivers” or a crackle-like sections running through your bar. These “rivers” run along side or surround the pigmented sections in your soap. Rivers (or Glivers as Clara likes to call them) must meet specific criteria when found in your soaps:  (a) colored with pigment such as Titanium Dioxide, rather than with mica or lake colorants; and (b) when heat was added to the soap for a gel phase.  Rivers can also be caused when you have a high sugar content in your soap, or some fragrance oils can cause overheating and rivers.  Glycerin rivers cure at a different rate than the “smooth” portions of your bar, causing an uneven or ridged look between the pigmented and non-pigmented sections. I believe the addition of rivers in some bars adds to the overall design which is what we are trying to accomplish with this challenge.

My first attempt to create rivers in my soap is the only soap I made that actually had rivers in the bars. I used my standard moisturizing soap recipe with 38% water.  The colors used were Pink Vibrance Mica, Green Neon Fluorescent Pigment, Neon Orange Fluorescent Pigment (mixed in water), and Titanium Dioxide  mixed with water all from Nurture Soap.

The design was made using a hanger swirl.  I placed the wooden loaf on a heating pad and covered the loaf with several towels. Unfortunately the heating pad I pulled out had a default two-hour timer and auto shut off so I had to keep a timer on to turn the heating pad back on every two hours for six hours which was very frustrating. The loaf was left covered over night without the heat once I went to bed.

Unfortunately I ran out of time to make a better “river” soap but I do love how this one turned out with the clear rivers in the white and between the colors adding additional depth to the soap.

Coming from a Soaping Newbie

Hi there everybody!

My name is Felecia Mayerhofer for all of those who do not know me. I am Danielle’s granddaughter. Now for those of you who are not aware of what Multiple Chemical Sensitivity is, this is the easiest way I have figured out to explain it. Take a sweet smelling vanilla body spray for example, this to the average person smells good, some would even say delicious. To my grandma this triggers what almost seems like an asthma attack/ cough. With tears welling up in her eyes and her face turning red, I have watched my grandma struggle to breathe because of Multiple Chemical Sensitivity. So all the fresh and sweet smelling fragrances of our favorite body sprays and detergents is what a huge, overfilled dumpster smells like to a person with MCS. Sounds horrible doesn’t it?

I do not suffer from Multiple Chemical Sensitivity(MCS) like my grandmother does, but for awhile the illness  made it really hard to go visit her. I was in my teens when the disease came on. To me, it felt like it came out of nowhere. One day me and my three siblings were staying the night, watching movies and spending time with her and before we knew it she could not be in the same room as us because of how potent our laundry detergent and deodorant were to her.

I remember when her and I used to go shopping together at Ross and Michael’s before MCS took over. We could spend 3 or more hours at just one store together. We would just be talking, laughing, and searching through every aisle. We would search high and low even if we weren’t in dire need of anything specific, then we would do the same thing at the next store. She also used to take me to one of my all time favorite stores… Sally’s Beauty Supply! I will admit that I have a problem. I have an addiction with coloring my hair, collecting makeup products as well as skin care products. I cannot tell you how much money my grandma has spent on me in that store before the MCS kicked into full throttle.

There will always be apart of me that wishes we could go to Ross together one last time…

but I have seen countless times what MCS does to her when she is in a place filled with a wide range of scents.

My grandma is a brilliant, strong, and independent woman. Even when her condition was at its worst she did not stop trying to find some sort of solution to cure/manage her MCS. After realizing that there is no true cure for this disease, she did not let that stop her. Instead she used all the information she had learned about the disease and decided that if she cannot tolerate chemically made fragrances she would make her own household and body care products. The onset of this condition is what jump started the Skin Zen company.

I have been there for my grandma and this journey with Skin Zen from the very beginning. I was mostly behind the scenes. I did a lot of running errands such as searching through the Dollar Tree for useful utensils for soap making. She taught me how to be a cameraman for her soap challenge videos, how to keep an invoice record, and much more! It was only a few months ago that I decided to jump all in and become a part of the Skin Zen family. My parents, Dan and Shanelle, were devastated when my grandma broke the news to them about shutting down the business. They decided to partner up with my grandma to reopen Skin Zen because they have fallen in love with all of her products. Over the years my grandma has been experimenting and learning how to improve her recipes to create the luxurious products we now have today. My parents and I are proud to be apart of the Skin Zen family.

Just last month in May was the first time I had ever assisted with the making of a bar of soap. My grandmother let me take the wheel on creating Inner Peace and I would just like to say that making this soap has changed my life! I know that may sound a bit dramatic but I mean it from the bottom of my heart. Being able to be apart of something bigger than myself and finally experiencing what it is like to handcraft something from literally nothing has truly changed me. I did not realize how much time, effort, labor, thought, and patience goes into something like this. Making soap is definitely a form of art and boy my grandma sure is talented! I would have not been able to finish making Inner Peace if she were not there to encourage and guide me the whole way. So even though I said it a million times in the blog piece, “The Creation of Inner Peace” thanks again for letting me make this soap with you grammie!

Now for those of you who consider yourselves experienced soap makers or even newbies like me, I have a question for you. What did you think and feel during the process of making your very first soap? Please share! I am very curious and would love to start communicating with our readers.

P.S.

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Yours truly,

Felecia Mayerhofer

Marketing and Production Support