CPOP

Something I have been wanting to try since I started soaping is the CPOP or cold process oven process method. This means you soap like normal, but then put the poured soap into a 170°F oven and force gel. I periodically fight overheating, especially in beer or milk soaps, so putting a soap batch in a warm oven sounds scary. But once upon a time making soap at all sounded scary, so there is no way to find out what can or can't be done without doing it.

Huzzah! Success! 

I not only CPOPed a soap, I did a milk soap, with CITRUS fragrance. Oh yeah I'm wild. I used about 40% whole milk yogurt and 60% goat milk. I did a Bastille with 10% castor and 90% olive oil. Added kaolin clay and colloidal oatmeal as well.

Nuture Soap Supplies Red Orange Mica, Bramble Berry's 10x Orange and Litsea essential oil.

I roughly split the batch and added the red orange mica and orange essential oil to one part and litsea essential oil and a dash of titanium dioxide to the other part.

I got this high olive oil batch to trace pretty thickly without much stick blending. I did a water discount, a little more than 2x the lye amount. I heated the oils and left the milk cold and then went at it. I got a medium trace without trouble! I did a very lazy multi faux funnel pour haha.

I added a few drops of orange to round out what was already peaking out from under the white and randomly swirled them with a skewer.

The oven was at 170°F when I put this in. I've heard of leaving it on for an hour at that temp, but I want to start slow. I turned the oven off as soon as this went in. I used the light to check so I wouldn't let any heat out. After about 2 hours it seemed a little mounded on top. I took it out then instead of leaving it in all night. I didn't want it to crack.

I unmolded this in the morning and let it sit out all day before cutting. Check it out! The middle orange is very muted while the top orange stayed bright! It doesn't smell cheesy at all and actually still smells really citrusy. I didn't burn off all the delicate essential oils after all. 

CPOP isn't actually that scary I found out. It's really just a way to force your soap into gel. It doesn't (I've seen this myth around...) make your soap cure up in a week. Curing isn't only about water evaporation I'm pretty sure. I cure my soaps for at least 8 weeks, but I recently tried one that had been going for 4 months. HEAVEN.