Tripod Thursday- Soap Morphs

Since Wednesday just flew by me, I am combining a "What's Up Wednesday" post with the "Tripod Thursday" one.

As you know, among other things, I make soaps. Usually I prefer to make what we call cold process soap, or cp soap for short. It is where you take lye and mix it with fats (oils and butters) and they react, heat up, and create soap. Now this process is truly an amazing event and it can be quite surprising too. One of the most surprising things that can happen is what we call "morphing". This is when you put in and see one color and end up with another. I don't just mean the thing you would expect, like mixing a blue and a yellow and getting a green. I mean, having a very pretty beige and a caramel colored soap when you look at it, and a few weeks later you have an all dark brown soap. This is an instance where the soap morphed. Morphing is usually caused by the ingredients in the soap reacting to the lye. Fragrance oils sometimes cause morphing, and anything that has vanilla in it, even if only a small amount, will usually morph as well. In fact, vanilla morphs brown. When sugars are added, as in milk soaps or honey, those will morph a tan to dark brown, depending upon the sugar content of the milk. Goats milk turns very orange for a time in the pot, looks caramel when curing, and goes brown by the time it's cured. As soapers, we generally expect vanilla and milks or honey to change our soap, so we compensate for that or at least expect it. But sometimes we are surprised by the morphing and can only explain the "why" by saying the gremlins came and visited!  Nobody really expects red hibiscus powder to turn gray/brown in cp soap, but it does. In melt and pour though, it is quite a lovely pink/red!
At any rate, here are pictures are of my morphed soap. I did expect the baby soap to go brown, as I used goat's milk in it. But the others were surprises. I maybe should have guessed that "Sugared Chestnuts" would go brown, but I didn't. Even so, while I consider all that dark brown to be ugly, it smells divine, and it doesn't stay on the shelf very long!  Besides that, many of my male clients, or females buying for the men in their lives, really enjoy the browns. Besides that, soap is soap, and good soap is good soap, even when brown! Lol!