Although I love making bright and colorful soap using micas, pigments, Lab Colors and other synthetic colorants, ever since I started making soap I’ve been drawn to using natural colorants in soap making.  To me there is a romantic notion that soap can be colored using natural herbs, spices and clays.

And if you sell soap…you probably know that consumers love the word “natural”.  Using botanicals and other natural colorants sounds great on a label.  “Colored naturally using alkanet and annatto seed herbal powders” sounds much better than “colored with Mica, Titanium Dioxide, iron oxide and Ferric Ammonium Ferrocyanide”.  

Over the past year and a half I’ve been experimenting with herbal powders, spices and clays and want to share my results with you.  We’ll start the series off today with how to test herbal and spice powders for pH stability and also how to make herbal infusions.