Trying to naturally colour cold process soap purple & green by mixing Annatto, Madder & Indigo

Colouring soaps naturally (without the aid of oxides, mica's etc) is something that we really love trying to do, but it isn't always easy!

Today we are trying to create vibrant green and purple colours from natural, plants based colourants.

We have achieved green in the past using Spirulina, Nettle and French green clay. However, we found the colours from Nettle and French green clay to be not quite as bright as we would like and though Spirulina initially creates a lovely green colour, it is prone to fading during the sure. We wanted to create a bright green that wouldn't fade. We have therefore decided to mix Annatto root (in the form of an infused oil) with Indigo dye added at trace, as both of these colours stick well for us in soap. We are hoping by mixing them we will create a bright green that doesn't fade!

For purple, we have used Brazilian Purple clay in the past. This creates a nice purple colour, but we just wanted something a tad brighter! To create purple we are mixing Madder powder (again as part of an infused oil) with Indigo dye at trace.

Of course, we will be doing our best to make the soap look pretty too, so we will be adding some purple Globe Amaranth flowers to the top of these bars to hopefully draw the purple and green colour scheme together.

Follow our cold process recipe and tutorial for details on how you can make this at home!

Our soaps are all palm oil free and this one is vegan friendly too.

The total ingredients we used for this soap are as follows:

(We made the soap in 2 batches and then further split each batch into 2 before adding the lye water and bringing to trace)

Water 220g
Sodium Hydroxide (Lye) 109g
Madder infused Olive Oil 85g
Annatto infused Olive Oil 85g
Regular Olive Oil 170g
Coconut Oil 184g
Shea Butter 75g
Cocoa Butter 38g
Castor Oil 57g
Sweet Almond Oil 99g
Indigo Dye 0.6g

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