Salt Bars!

Over on the Soap Making Forum, lots of people just LOVE salt bars.  It took me a while to warm up to the idea - I mistakenly assumed they left your skin feeling like you just spent the day at the beach.  All that salt just makes me want to take a shower.  What finally made me try a batch was that several members swear by salt bars for their acne. My son has a pretty bad case, especially on his back, so I thought "what the heck, give it a try."   Salt bars are often made from 100% coconut oil, which theoretically should dry your skin out like the Sahara Desert.  However, if you superfat at least 15% (most seem to superfat 20% with 100% coconut oil bars), that mitigates the drying effects of the oil.  The other thing many suggested is to let them cure for at least three months. 

I made my first batch of salt bars about 6 weeks ago.  My son is here this weekend, but didn't come with any of the his acne meds. So I decided to try one of the salt bars. Wow!  The lather is fantastic!  Thick, creamy, bubbly, - and lots of it. I'm going to send the bar back with him for his dad and other care-givers to use.  Obviously I'll have to report back on whether or not it helped his acne, but it sure was a nice bar of soap.  I tried it to wash my hands - it rinses off so cleanly!  

The recipe I used was 90% coconut oil, 10% shea butter, 50% of the oil weight in salt, and I used coconut milk instead of water. I superfatted at 18%, assuming that the coconut milk would add some more fat to the mix.   Making salt bars is easy.  Mix the oil and lye solution as usual, then add the salt at trace.  Don't discount the water - use a full 38% of oil weight in water or coconut milk.  Salt bars harden fast - you have to take them out of the mold and cut them within a couple of hours, or they will be so hard they'll crumble when you try to cut them.  Unless you add color, they will turn out very white.  Any FO you use may also change the color.

For my second bath, which I only made a week ago, I bought a standard rectangle silicone mold from Wholesale Supplies Plus - I could not find it anywhere else.  I used the same recipe with the exception of upping the salt to 75% of the weight of the oils.  I'm interested to see what I think of the difference in salt concentration in the soap. The mold makes some beautiful bars of soap.  If you use a log mold and cut the bars, they will look more rustic.

My original batch are the green bars on the left, below:

Here are the bars taken from the silicone mold:

and...

 I can't wait to try the second batch.

So go ahead and give salt bars a try!