Ugly Pumpkin Soap

A friend requested a pumpkin soap with real pumpkin purée and a pumpkin fragrance. Challenge accepted.

Surely using pumpkin purée in a soap is an exciting enough additive right? Not to this girl! I decided to try four new things at once (not counting a new fragrance)! Pumpkin purée of course, egg yolk, titanium dioxide in lye water and bentonite clay.

Titanium dioxide in lye water is pretty easy, it wouldn't change the process much. I decided to do this because the fragrance I was using, Sweet Pumpkin Spice (from Wholesale Supplies Plus) has an 11% vanilla content and will discolor. It was kind of an experiment since many say not to bother fighting discoloring vanilla fragrances. I wanted some orange in it, so I set a little soap aside-unfragranced- and add some Tangerine Wow neon (Bramble Berry) to it.

The egg was trickier. In order for the egg yolk to stay raw I had to soap cool and make sure only the yolk (none of the white) made it into the soap. It was also recommended to temper the egg yolk with a little oil before adding it to all of the oils.

Bentonite clay is a lot like adding kaolin clay but it seems like a heavier clay, as it settled out of the oil mixture more than kaolin does.

I read a lot of different ways to add pumpkin to soap. Some add it straight to the lye water or freeze a mixture of water and pumpkin in ice cube trays and then add the lye. I also have seen soapers adding the pumpkin to thinly traced soap. I decided to add the pumpkin to the oils because I did not plan ahead enough to make frozen pumpkin cubes and I have had good luck with putting additives in with the oil before the lye is added instead of to the soap. I added 1 ounce of pumpkin and deducted it from the water amount. Adding pumpkin to the oils was kind of weird since pumpkin is a water ingredient and wouldn't mix with the oils. Boy, it didn't. It was chunky and gross looking haha. 

When I read up about adding egg it was recommended to exclude any whites, even the membrane that holds the yolk together.

My many additives.

I added a puff of silk and it just looked so pretty sitting on top of the super white water.

I made sure the oils were at a cool 82°F so the egg wouldn't cook.

Well it looks like some of the egg did cook. It's also possible this is the slightly dried skin that formed on the top of the egg mixture.

I strained out the egg pieces just to be on the safe side.

At this point I was pretty glad I decided to add titanium dioxide since this is such an ugly color!

As expected the pumpkin didn't blend very well with the oils. Pretty chunky and pukey looking!

I set aside 25% of the batch and colored it with the Tangerine Wow neon and didn't fragrance it. I added the fragrance to the other 75% of the soap and didn't add any color to that.

I poured at a thin trace and the orange sort of dissipated into the white, making it look very bland. I'm counting on this discoloring brown (at least a little) and becoming more interesting.

But just to be on the safe side if it (miraculously) stays white, I added copper sparkle mica to the top. In erratic splatters of course...

Well, it did not discolor!! Haha I think this is the first time EVER that I was disappointed to find the soap still so white! Titanium dioxide is a strong whitening agent, but I didn't think it could over power 11% vanilla content, pumpkin and grey bentonite clay! Who'd-a-thunk it...