Aditives

This is the time you can add other ingredients to your soap base if you wish. How about honey and oatmeal or maybe ground pumice to exfoliate. 

There are many other additives that are fun to use in soap, have a look at the chart below for some ideas:  

Remember that many flowers turn brown in soap.  Ground Oatmeal is an easy additive that produces a wonderful scrubby bar when suspended in soap, so too does cornmeal (Polenta), but suspending herbs can take practice to perfect. 

Embedding Items

You can also embed items in your soap very easily.  This is a very popular and versatile way to personalise your bars.  Why not try a small toy or a smaller decorative soap often known as an embed, slice or dice different colours of soap and add them, or how about embedding a small piece of your cross stitch or even a laminated business card or picture. 

Adding Emollients

You can also add ingredients such as Sweet Almond Oil or Aloe Vera but remember that these may decrease the soap's clarity and lather slightly.  Only add solid oils to an opaque base.  e.g.  If you add cocoa butter to clear soap it will soon give a mouldy appearance as the oils solidify.  Great for the skin, but not very appealing to the eye.

I advise never to exceed 3% total additional oils as this can have an adverse effect when layering or embedding and cause the soap layers to split .

Do not embed any items with sharp edges or points!