How to Use Natural Colorants in Soaps

Make homemade soaps completely natural by adding natural ingredients for color. There is no need to taint your natural soaps by adding artificial coloring when so many natural options are at your finger tips. Add color in small amounts, such as one teaspoon. Add more coloring to your soap mixture until the desired color is achieved.

Things You'll Need

• Herbs and plants
• Lye
• Oil

Instructions

1. Make natural shades of purple and blue by adding oil steeped alkanet, indigo root, madder root, poppy seeds and spirulina. Add less of these ingredients to get a lavender or light blue, and more for bold, richer colors.

2. Add kelp, chlorophyll, alfalfa, cucumber, sage or spinach to get lovely green coloring. Gage the brightness of green you will get by the natural coloring of the ingredient added to the soap.

3. Create soapy sunshine by mixing annatto seed, ground calendula petals, ground carrots, ground chamomile, curry powder, ground tumeric or saffron. Achieve colors ranging from creamy yellow to bright gold with these ingredients.

4. Color your soaps pink and red with beet root, powdered cochineal, red Morrocan clay or pink clay. Mix in small amounts of any of these colorings to get pinks and add more to get red soap.

5. Mix in cinnamon, cloves, cocoa powder, coffee grounds, comfrey root, elderberries, henna, milk or rosehip seeds to make soaps that are earth toned.

6. Test the colorants in a 1 to 8 ratio of water to lye. Add 1/4 teaspoon of colorant to the lye mixture. See how the dyes react to oils by adding a small amount of coloring to 1/4 c of heated oil. Let the dye set in the lye and oil mixture for 24 hours to get a true color test.

7. Add your natural colorant to either the lye or oil mixture depending on which mix resulted in the best color. Add the colored lye or oil to a small soap batch to see how the soap will color.