How We Colour Our Soaps Naturally

While a bright, colourful bar of soap may be eye catching or suit your bathroom décor perfectly, it’s probably not doing a whole lot of good for your skin. Unfortunately, brightly coloured soaps usually contain a whole raft of artificial colours and dyes, and also artificial preservatives to ensure they stay that colour for a long time.

Artificial dyes and colourants can cause many skin issues from itchy, dry skin to eczema and dermatitis. In line with keeping our products all natural, we also use natural alternatives to colour our soaps.

Clays: we use French Green Kaolin Clay to colour many of our soaps, including Aloe Vera & Seaweed, Lavender and Spearmint & Green Tea. Depending on the amount added we can get a light minty colour to a deep earthy green.

We also use Red Clay to colour our pink coloured soaps such as Rose Geranium, Gardeners and Kakadu Plum & Pomelo. Clays are great to work with as we can split the soap and add more clay to one half of the batch, them swirl this through the lighter coloured batch to get a beautiful pattern in the soap.

Spices: We often use turmeric and paprika in the soaps to get orange and red colours. For example, we use turmeric in our Mandarin & Vanilla Soap, and paprika in our Desert Lime & Blood Orange and Lemongrass, Honey & Wheatgerm soaps. Luckily, we only need to use a small amount of the spice to get a good colour pay-off, so you don’t notice the smell of the soap over the essential oils.

Essential Oils: Some essential oils have quite a strong colour to them that helps to colour the soaps as well. Vanilla extract and lime oil give a nice rich brown colour as you can see in our Vanilla or Lime & Cassia soaps. Mandarin oil is a beautiful bright orange colour, however this one does fade after a while which is why we also add turmeric to the mandarin and vanilla soaps.

The mandarin oil we use is from Australia, and interestingly the Australian oils tend to have brighter colours than oils we get internationally. The colours and fragrances of essential oils can vary from season to season. A really good season for mandarins will have brighter colours than a poor season.

Chocolate Husks: Our Exfoliating Chocolate soap is simply our pure soap with crushed cocoa husks added, that we get from Bahen & Co. These not only give the soap a nice exfoliant but also gives it a deep brown colour (and it smells like a block of Bahen & Co Chocolate!).

Because we use natural products to colour the soaps, each batch may vary, so don’t be alarmed if your favourite soap looks a little different to the last time you bought it! We also don’t add any preservatives to keep their colours, so the colours may fade, or darken, over time.