In our early days we trialled many, many naturally derived colourants (herbal as opposed to clays and oxides) and found almost all lacking. Its now been so long, we felt it was time to give the modern extractions a go, and you'll find some of them in our Natural Colours Pages!
As time permits, we hope to trial a few more, but we feel these additions to our colour catalogue will please those of you who like their colours natural and/or muted!
The thing to remember with colours from Botanical materials is that they will fade, many before the soap even gels, many mutate depending on the pH, and all will fade because they are natural dyes, as opposed to pigments. Non fading natural colours are oxides and clays. So, if you sell your soap and it sits in a shop, or under fluorescent lighting much of each week, be warned they will pale to cream very quickly. However, these colours are lovely (yes even we agree lol!) and gentle and serene.
All colours can be mixed and matched in CP, ie natural, synthetic, pigments, dyes etc, and mostly they will all work well in Melt & Pour.
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Alkanet Root Infusion. This is a very old picture (as you can see by the lack of straight cut soaps!! (You may wonder why we sell crinkle cutters? Well, this is the bread knife cut from circa 2000!! This is where I began!). This trial of Alkanet Root soap was using a very, very concentrated oil solution of ground alkanet root. It formed part of my oil portion, if you use a less strong infusion, you 'll achieve from maroon to pale blue/grey.
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This is our new Natural Golden Yellow Dye - it is from Turmeric, the Indian spice. It was the most robust of our test colours. This colour has good staying power for a Natural Dye. However, all my previous trials using Turmeric powder were less happy. When using the powdered spice, the colour comes out much more of a dirty yellow clay sort of colour.
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This is simply our Madder Root Powder, made into an oil slurry, and spooned into the raw soap. If you want a richer, stronger pink, we suggest you triple infuse the Madder Root Powder and then use this as part of the oil portion. You'll avoid the specks you can see in the photo if you use the infusion, but I was quite pleased with this trial batch - specks and all! This soap is fragranced with Nature's Blush Fragrance, a light and dreamy, rosy fragrance. (This fragrance is on our wish list!). This colour has good staying power for a Natural Dye.
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Nice green, oil soluble Chlorophyll dye. I have bad memories of my previous experiments with Water Soluble Chlorophyll as it tends to sweat out of CP over a couple of months, like brown ooze. This oil soluble Natural Green is so far holding its own, showing no seepage. This colour has good staying power for a Natural Dye. This soap is Fragranced with Wasabi Fragrance.
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Annatto Seed Powder infused in Oil, and used as part of the Oil portion. Triple infused is best for strong colour. Creates a nice sort of gentle caramel/buttery colour. Expect your cured CP soap to have approximately 50% less colour intensity once cured.
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From the capscium, this lovely Peachy Orange Natural Dye ends up an lovely apricot colour, this soap is fragranced with BB Fresh Mango. Expect your cured CP soap to have approximately 50% less colour intensity once cured.
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Now the not so good!
Beetroot! This is what finally prompted me to work on this page - the number of times we get asked about using beetroot to colour CP! So, here is 25ml of highly concentrated red/purple beet dye poured into 200g of raw CP - creates a lovely shade of.......umm cream! So here you have it! It does work nicely in lip balm though!
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This blue is dark indigo in colour, like Biro Ink, but once the high pH soap action starts happening, you are left with a dull unpleasing grey - unless you are looking for something between Battleship Grey to Dove Grey! I know it looks an almost pleasant pale mauve, but its a really musty, muddy lifeless GREY!
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This is the same colour, but a few days on and the colour is starting to bleach out in the daylight As it ages (and this is over a week) it is gradually speckling out in to white blotches and bleaching even more.
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Well, here it is - yuk! Still it certainly proves that this gardenia blue is not for CP!
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