(March 1, 2011)
As suggested by a friend of mine, I set out this week to make a nice bubble bath for Charlie's evening baths. Something gentle with natural ingredients and soothing and bubbly!
I found this recipe several times over, so decided it must be a good one:
1 cup liquid castile soap
3/4 cup water
1 tsp. glycerin
6 drops essential oil
For a soothing sleepytime bath, I selected Lavender EO. I mixed it up, and put it in a nice pump bottle and got excited about using it, but it doesn't work!!
The only thing that happened is that it turned the bath water very milky and slightly lavender-scented. I even added just straight soap and it didn't bubble! Maybe I need more glycerin?
This was a pretty disappointing project for us... Though the bath was nicely soapy and smelly and it did the job getting a small body clean, the whole point of a bubble bath is the BUBBLES!
I'll probably continue to tinker and search for better recipes to make this work.
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| Pants helps to stir it up |
Cost breakdown: Castile soap $5.00 + glycerin $0.30 + EO (varies depending on type of oil) = between $5.50 and $6.00 for just under 2 cups of bubble bath. That doesn't work.
On the plus side, apparently this liquid Dr. Bronner's soap can be used for a multitude of things, so at least I can use the rest for other projects along the way. And the "bubble" bath still smells quite nice. Maybe it'll just be cloud-bath from now on...
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| Cloudy bath water! |
Oh that's too bad it didn't work! I was thinking that the big thing about natural soaps is that they DON'T bubble, so there must be something that has to be added to make it thin and slippery...???I have no idea what tho...
ReplyDeleteYes, I've since learned that Dr. Bronner's doesn't foam in hard water, which is apparently what we have. Oh well... We've been enjoying the nightly "cloud bath" for it's lavender smells anyway!
ReplyDeleteThis and very similar recipes are all over the Internet, and similarly all over the Internet are stories just like the above. More glycerin won't help, making it thin and slippery won't help. And you're lucky it made the bath water only cloudy, not scummy, and didn't leave a ring -- or did it?
ReplyDeleteIf you want to make bubble bath, read the ingredients of some commercial bath foams and you'll see what it takes. There are a lot of surfactants suitable for the job, but soap is one of the surfactants that's practically useless for it. You CAN make a bath foamy with ENOUGH soap, but if your water's hard, that's an ENORMOUS amount of soap for that amount of water. Imagine the amount of soap you use to make a lather in your hands, and then scale up that amount of soap by the ratio of the volume of water in a bathtub to the amount of water you put on your hands, and you'll see!
The bubble bath mixture I was awarded US patent 5,336,446 for (after inventing it as a favor for a friend's children, to avoid urogenital irritation and make denser foam than others) was made of, in preferred version:
diammonium lauryl sulfosuccinate
lauramidopropyl betaine
disodium laureth-3 sulfosuccinate
I can sell you gallons if you'd like, and you can doctor it with essential oils, etc., but be warned: some essential oils are catalysts that will accelerate the breakdown of that and similar chemicals, as is well known to soap makers.