Chem Blog Week 15

This week I along with my group formed a soap company with our self- made soap!

For this project, we were told that we were going to make soap and would have to present it as an actual company with company name, packaging, and a business card. We also had to make an Evernote presentation on our process in creating our soap along with information pertaining to the questions asked in the rubric. There are two ways of making soap that we talked about, mixing a fat base like coco butter or olive oil with lye or the melt and pour ,method using a soap base and melting it along with adding essential oils, dye, and a scent. Mr. Abud said that we will be using the melt and pour method because when using lye it is necessary to have more ventilation. He also recommended that we buy additional supplies like molds, packaging, special ingredients and soap bases.

A few days later we were ready to make our soap. I brought my group Chinese takeout boxes which were all decorated for the holidays to create a type of theme. I also brought plastic wrap for the soap so the bars could stay neat in the boxes. Everyone came into class excited and ready to work on their soaps. It was pretty entertaining see the entire class go into attack mode to get the best supplies Mr. Abud brought with him! When we all had our supplies we began to work. We started by dividing our soap base up into four parts for each person. We then melted ¼ of the base but I noticed that it was going very slowly so  conjured up the idea of cutting the base into smaller pieces to quicken the melting process. We then cut the cubes smaller and that really helped the base melt faster. We found that the melting point of our base was about 80 degrees and it took it a few minutes for it to completely dissolve into its liquid form. We were told that when melting the soap that we should be careful  of not boiling the soap base because it would mess up the following processes. When it melted we then added the essential oils and he the dyes and the poured the mixture into the molds.

The next day they were ready to take the soaps out of their molds and put them into their packages. We then later on had to show our presentations to the class. Our presentation had a good layout, great explanation, and an awesome logo edited by yours truly! We were able to answer all of the questions given by Mr. Abud thoroughly.  

I had a lot of fun with this project because I was able to practice my team work skills. I am the type of person who likes to work alone because I have had experiences with people not doing their part in the assignment. But also working by myself I do not have debate with decisions that need to be made. However, this project went fine teamwork wise but I wish we were more prepared and connected but overall it was great!