Also, I’ve started doing tech writing related blogging over at The Art of Documentation.  I’m still adding content to the “services” section of the site, but I think the rest is pretty much ready to roll.  Feel free to bang on it and tell me what you think!

For this recipe, I’m using ingredients that are pretty common, or easy to find in most areas. Essential oils can be found in small amounts at places like health food stores and craft stores often carry essentials and fragrances. Just make sure, if you buy fragrance oil, that you’re buying “body safe” oils and not stuff for candles.

So, let’s start with a basic recipe in two parts.

Dry ingredients:

• Baking Soda – 8 ounces
• Citric Acid – 4 ounces
• Corn Starch – 4 ounces
• Salts – 4 ounces ( in these pictures, I used Dead Sea Salts, but mineral salts work too, and are easier to find and significantly less expensive.)

Wet Ingredients:

• Water – .75 tbsp
• Essential or Fragrance Oil – 2 tsp (for these I used a Ginger Peach.)
• Oil – 2.5 tbsp (I used cherry kernel, but any light vegetable oil will work.)
• Food coloring – 1 or 2 drops. (Your color will look very dark in the emulsion, but will be light in the fizzies, so as to not leave rings around the tub. For this batch I used one drop red and two drops yellow. The final result will be very light peach.)

Step One:

Begin by putting all of your dry ingredients into a big bowl. Glass is best because it’s non-reactive. Whisk or pestle those pesky clumps out. You want a fairly smooth consistency throughout the entire mix.

Step Two: 

 Blend your wet ingredients together. I usually use a small jar and shake it up. Don’t worry about separation too much, you’re not going to get a full emulsion. Then, while whisking, slowly add small amounts of the liquid to your dry ingredients. Here we see my faithful Igor prepare to pour.

If the mixture starts to foam, you’re going too fast. Quickly whisk the reacting ingredients into the nonreactive part and you should be able to stop the reaction. I add about a teaspoon at a time. When all of the wet ingredients have been added, you should have a mixture with the consistency of slightly damp sand. It should clump together.

Step Three:

Once your mixture is together, you have a pretty limited amount of time in which to get it into molds. To create the giant Soapy Hollow ball of bath doom, I use round christmas tree ornaments that were designed to be filled with goodies. To do a three-dimensional bomb like these, you pack each side, then overfill a tad and the center and press the two sides together. It takes a little practice to get a feel for how much “filling” you need, so don’t get discouraged if your first couple fall apart. Here we see Igor holding a filled ball.

Step Four: 

You don’t need to leave them in the mold for very long, and in fact can tap them out as soon as you fill them. These are four bombs we made with this batch.

You can use all sorts of things to make your fizzies; muffin tins, ice cube trays, candy molds, Aunt Magnolia’s denture case…whatever makes you happy. This batch didn’t make quite enough for five bombs, and it started reacting, so I quickly stuffed what was left of the batch into my “bath cookies” mold. When using objects that surround the seltzer mix, the mix must stay in the object until dry, or it will crumble when you try to take it out. This is what the bath cookies look like after spending the night in the mold.

Step Five: 

Once they are completely dry, store bath bombs in an airtight container or bag. High humidity will make them activate. Because we used oil and water and no preservatives, you want to use them within about 6 months. Assuming you can keep them for that long. Igor demands payment in immediate fizzy baths, but you may have better luck actually getting to *use* yours.

When you’re ready to use one, just drop it into a warm bath, and relax.

Let’s take a look at some of those products, shall we?

• Jason’s “Pure, Natural & Organic” liquid soaps, body washes and shampoos are made with  Myreth Sulfate Sodium. To delve into the chemistry for a minute, making Myreth Sulfate Sodium requires ethoxylating a conventional non-organic fatty chain with the petrochemical Ethylene Oxide, which produces caricinogenic 1,4-Dioxane as a contaminant.

• The major cleansing ingredient in Avalon “Organics” soaps, body washes and shampoos, Cocamidopropyl Betaine, contains conventional non-organic agricultural material combined with Amdiopropyl Betaine.

• Nature’s Gate “Organics” main cleansers are Disodium Laureth Sulfosuccinate (ethoxylated) and Cocamidopropyl Betaine.

• Kiss My Face “Obsessively Organic” cleansers are Olefin Sulfonate and Cocamidopropyl Betaine.

• Juice “Organics”, Giovanni “Organic Cosmetics”, Head “Organics”, Desert Essence “Organics”, and Ikove “Organic” all use Cocamdiopropyl Betaine as a main cleansing ingredient and no cleansers made from certified organic material.

Just as milk producers hopped on the “no hormones” bandwagon, cosmetics corporations have hopped on the “organic” wagon.  Except instead of actually getting on the wagon and producing healthy, non toxic, organic products, what they’ve done is just painted the organic wagon on the side of their petrochemical truck and called it a day.

But you can do something about it.  You can buy natural products from companies like mine, like Dr. Bronner, like Burt’s Bees, like the thousands of small market cap companies who actually care about our customers, our products and our planet.

Educate yourself about the products on American shelves, most of which contain ingredients that have been banned in most of the world as carcinogens.  Learn to say no to body and food products manufactured in countries where there are no safety standards, like China.  Read the ingredient label.  If you can’t pronounce the majority of ingredients, you probably don’t want to put it on your skin.

And remember; marketing and advertising people get paid to lie.  It’s their job, it’s what they do.  Just because something says “Organic” on the marketing materials, doesn’t mean it’s actually a healthy or organic product.  Anything where the first or second ingredient is a sulfate or other chemical surfactant, then the product you’re holding is not organic in any sense of the word.

The earliest known evidence of soap use are Babylonian clay cylinders dating from 2800 BC containing a soap-like substance. A formula for soap consisting of water, alkali and cassia oil was written on a Babylonian clay tablet around 2200 BC.

The Ebers papyrus (Egypt, 1550 BC) indicates that ancient Egyptians bathed regularly and combined animal and vegetable oils with alkaline salts to create a soap-like substance. Egyptian documents mention that a soap-like substance was used in the preparation of wool for weaving.

The Arabs made the soap from vegetable oil such as olive oil or some aromatic oils such as thyme oil. Sodium Lye (Al-Soda Al-Kawia) NaOH was used for the first time and the formula hasn’t changed from the current soap sold in the market. From the beginning of the 7th century soap was produced in Nablus (Palestine), Kufa (Iraq) and Basra (Iraq). Arabic soapmakers were the first to color and scent soaps, and wrote instructions on how to mold, cure and cut hard soap.

The word “soap” appears first in a European language in Pliny the Elder’s Historia Naturalis, which discusses the manufacture of soap from tallow and ashes, but the only use he mentions for it is as a pomade for hair; he mentions rather disapprovingly that among the Gauls and Germans,  men were more likely to use it than women [1]

Currently, bar soaps are made using Sodium Hydroxide. Sodium Hydroxide (NaOH) is created by running electricity through salt water.

Liquid soap is made using Potassium Hydroxide (KOH), sometimes known as caustic potash.

Soap is fascinating stuff. It is actually a salt that foams! This crystalline nature of soap allows it to be made clear as glass when boiled in alcohol with sugars. (Like Soapy Hollow glycerin soaps.)  A salt is what you get when you mix an acid and a base together. The acids and bases neutralize each other and a salt forms in the process. Soap is made from acidic oils and an alkaline solution. Oil and alkali must be in balance to make the perfect bar of soap.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration defines soap as: “is any product where the bulk of the nonvolatile matter in the product consists of an alkali salt of fatty acids and the product’s detergent properties are due to the alkali-fatty acid compounds, and the product is labeled, sold, and represented solely as soap” [21 CFR 701.20].

Interestingly enough, if a product intended to cleanse the human body does not meet all the criteria for soap, as listed above, it is either a cosmetic or a drug.  For example, many clear soaps are actually sodium laurel sulfate, which is a petrochemical detergent.  Those are classified as a cosmetic.  Soaps that that makes a claim like “deoderant” or “cures acne” are classified as drugs, and not as soap.

I’ll write more later on the difference between soaps and detergents.  I’ll also be talking about how new proposals on the way to the congressional floor will impact businesses and consumers of boutique and artisan soap.