Purple Herbal

The swirled, almost indigo hue of Purple Herbal complements the deep, musky, but still sweetly herbaceous scent of the Clary Sage.

The recipe for this soap begins with an inky purple infusion of alkanet root, which takes a few weeks to fully give up its colour to the olive oil in which it is steeped.

Careful measurement and trials help us to make natural plant colours with varying degrees of intensity.

Goats Milk Soap - we kid you not

Goatsmilk soap was a challenge. The qualities of the milk that give the extra creamy lather complicate the soap-making. There is a very rapid generation of heat from the fats and proteins in the milk, so you have to work quickly and keep checking the temperature of the lye mixture.

If you get past this stage without incident, the soap mixture can still become unstable during the super-heating process that happens naturally once it has been poured into the wooden mould. If this happens, some of the oils that should remain in the soap are driven off, seeping out through the bottom of the mould and the soap is ruined, with gaping holes left in it. Not very appealing.

So the perfect method took three attempts to evolve and we still make this very special soap only in small batches, just 12 bars at a time, as it is easier to control the heat this way.

The smell of the finished soap is amazing and worth all the effort. The milk gives the soap its nutty caramel colour and sweet, warm scent, slightly reminiscent of toffee and the kitchen after baking.

To complete the fragrancing of Just Kiddin, Sweet Orange essential oil is added, plus a swirl of golden calendula petals within and on the top. One of my favourites, there's a bar of it in the shower at the moment.

Anne

Grubby Gardener

We developed our Grubby Gardener soap because very dirty hands also need moisturising. We include Shea Butter in this soap, however we also use over a litre of olive oil in our recipe for a soap loaf that cuts into 30 bars. We do our cutting by hand and it's one of the nicest parts of the making process, with the smell of the freshly made soap in the room and the neat rows of bars accumulating one by one on the rack.

GG is a very cleansing bar with finely ground madder root and tea tree oil, known for anti-bacterial and deodorising properties. The scent of this bar is given extra depth with a blend of sweet orange and cedarwood essential oils. These fruity and woody scents are a very good foil for the slightly astringent, but clean-smelling tea tree.

This is one of our best-selling soaps, but don't leave it in the shed to use at the garden tap, as a customer's friend did. The mice clearly liked Grubby Gardener too, as the many tiny teethmarks demonstrated. (I will add here that our soap must not be eaten)

You might also want to try one of the soaps with exfoliating coffee grounds - Devilish Dark and Spice Macchiato.

Moroccan Moon - with Coffee

Honey and benzoine give this tan specimen a rich nutty caramel fragrance. A sprinkling of dried coffee provides two dark layers and soft exfoliating characteristics to the soap.

It has been poured in three layers and scalloped on the top surface. It also combines a tube of pure Colne Bar, to make a moon affect, set above a Moroccan landscape (with a little bit of imagination and squinting you might see it too).

Probably our most adventurous, when we made it, incorporating several techniques and combinations. I had to work fast during the final stages, as it was prone to set quickly.

Moroccan Moon has evolved into several soaps in their own right. 

Spice Machiato, takes the Coffee theme a little further and combined with a coffee brew, it  makes a masculine bar. The embedded dried ground coffee, provides the base colouring and embedded lightly through out, gives a definite ex-foliating quality to the bar.

Customers have expressed surprised exclamations, and have come back to tell us, "That coffee thing, you know it actually works!"

Well we hoped it would. (I'll let you into a secret, it wasn't all guess work).

Maldon Mudlark, is rich dark brown and combines cinnamon and coffee to make this an extremely fragrant bar to use, good for working hands but being based on Colne Bar is moisturising too.

An invigorating bar to use at the end of your day.

Wrapped Soap

Current Stock

You can now see our current stock in the gadget on the top right column. It tracks our batches directly so it is up to date, if you can't make it to one of the Farmers Markets or local outlets, then you can always email your order to orders@colnesoapmakers.co.uk.

Wrapped Soap for Sale

The photograph above shows our soap wrapped ready for sale in one of our soap boxes.

The waxed paper protects the soap after curing, but it still allows the colour to show through slightly.