Monday, January 9, 2012

Let's Talk Suds

Recently I made 2 simple soap each with an interesting additive that would affect the way a soap lathers.  These 2 are made with the exact formula and superfat percentage, one loaf made with one added organic egg (see blog post What Does Egg Contribute to Soap?), the other made with 3/4 tsb bentonite clay (Plain White Soap, Really?!).  Now I'm going to talk about the different kind of lather these 2 produce.

The egg soap produces suds texture very close to what you get when you beat an egg white with high speed electrical beater like you are making whipped cream.  The bubbles are very uniform in size.  It starts big and fluffy, then slowly turns into denser foam.  It feels really airy and weightless, like washing with cloud (I would imagine that's how it feels like if cloud is actually reachable!)  Now that I think about it, it's almost like the same feeling I get when I use the bottle foamer to pump my liquid soap, uniform airy and weightless!

Then I tried the bentonite clay soap.  It starts slow, then bubbles up consistently, but surprisingly not uniform in size.  See the photos yourself!  It creams up and produces slippery foam that feels dense and with weight. 

I let the foam sit for few hours, in both cases.  When I came back from dinner, the foam from egg soap already disappeared to nothing which is expected, but the foam from bentonite clay soap still there in tact! Except, it's all dried out, interesting isn't it?!

8 comments:

  1. It's very interesting, but they have both great bubbles! Maybe that's why they use bentonite in shaving soap?

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  2. @Marga, I believe Bentonite clay is used in shaving soap to provide that long lasting stable foam, and now I believe it!

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  3. None of my soaps produces foam like Yours. It's astonishing. But I prefer the bentonite type of foam.
    Petra

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  4. nice foam pics! did you whip up the lather with a shaving brush?

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  5. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  6. @Cocobong, no shaving brush, just fingers! I was surprised how foaming the clay adds to the soap.
    (edited, typo)

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  7. OH these are such beautiful photographs of foam! The new spinning of the wet soap does produce such lovely bubbles and lathers. Thanks once again for sharing such interesting comparisons!

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  8. I love this blog post! So great! The bentonite clay is such a great stabilizer for lather. I love it in shaving bars. =)

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