MAKING SOAP WITH CLAY

Natural clays have a wonderful effect on the skin. After a hard day at work, nothing beats coming home, smacking on some soothing mud mask and hibernating on the couch with a glass of wine.

There are many types of clays that are popular in skincare products. Here's a short list:
- Fuller's Earth
- Bentonite
- White Clay
- Kaolin Clay
- French Green Clay or Pink Clay or Yellow Clay

Each clay has their own composition of minerals and benefits but essentially all clays help deep cleanse the skin, draw out impurities and tighten the surface.

How to use clay

There are many ways you can use clay with your skincare.

1) Mix raw clay powder with some purified water and slap it on your skin. Add a few drops of essential oils and some jojoba oil or rosehip oil for more therapeutic benefits.

2) OR you could do what we did and add it to Craftiviti's Melt & Pour soap base for an instant homemade clay soap that helps detox and cleanse skin.

The process is really easy and we'll walk you through it with some photos we took.

Here's everything you need for some homemade soap.

1) Melt & Pour Soap Base
You will need a good block of Melt&Pour Soap base. Make sure you know the ingredients for this product as some tend to contain alcohol and other addictives. Here we used an SLS free soap base made from Virgin Coconut Oil and Unrefined Palm Oil. That's why the colour you see is slightly opaque and yellowish. You can get the same soap base here

2) Pure Essential Oil
Pick some essential oils that you like. Here we used RAW Lemon, Peppermint and Grapefruit Essential Oil by Craftiviti. We decided to make two kinds of soaps here. Follow on and you'll see.

3) Soap Mold
You will need a mold that will make a good hand-size soap and is easy to demold. You can buy them here

4) Clay
And finally, your clay. Here we used Organic French Green Clay from Greece.

Here's what the Organic French Green Clay looks like up close

Step 1

Place soap base in a microwave safe glass bowl and heat that up at low temperature. Check the soap from time to time and give it a good stir. Do not overheat soap.

Step 2

Once the soap has melted, mix the clay with some water to form a wet paste. The amount to use depends on how much soap you plan to make. Here we used one teaspoon of clay to make one hand-size soap. You can sieve the clay before adding water to remove larger particles.

Step 3
Add some essential oil to the melted soap base. Here we used Peppermint Essential Oil from Craftiviti which went really well with the French Green Clay. Then mix the clay into the soap base. Stir gently.

Step 4

Pour the entire mixture into the mold. As you can see from the photo above there will be bubbles on the surface of the mold. Two things you can do to get rid of the bubbles. One, spray some isopropyl alcohol onto the surface and watch the bubbles POP. Two, just shave the surface off when the soap hardens. 

While we wait for the clay soap to set, we made another soap out of Grapefruit and Lemon Essential Oil. Just melt the soap base and drip the essential oils in. Here we used 5 drops each. You can also add a few drops of carrier oil such as Jojoba or Avocado Oil for more moisturizing effect.

And here we have two very different soaps that's great for the skin without the chemicals and artificial fragrances. 

Prep time: 10 minutes

Setting time: 30 minutes