I’ve been playing lately with natural soap colorants and wanted to experiment with red palm oil.  I make a ton of pumpkin soap in the fall and thought that this would be great for coloring.

Red palm oil, which is bright orange, gets it color from carotenes (like carrots and tomatoes).  It is bleached, refined and deodorized to give us the creamy palm oil that most of us are familiar with.

In doing some research I decided to use red palm oil as 33% of my oils.  Most of the websites I came across said to use it for no more than 50% of oils.  I did a 33% palm, 33% lard and 33% olive oil type of recipe.  Nothing fancy.  I ordered my red palm oil from Camden-Grey.

I used 33% red palm oil in my batch and that ended up being to much.  It was staining and colored the bubbles as you can see a bit in this picture.

Oh.  And it stained my mold.  Sigh.

I’ll give it another go…but use 5-10% and see what I get.  Anybody else use red palm oil?  How much do you use?

-Amanda