Summary
Highlights
Safiya shares her love for fancy soap and her aspiration to create her own, leading her on a quest to find advanced soap art tutorials online. She distinguishes between simple melt-and-pour methods and the more complex scratch-made loaf method she wishes to attempt.
Safiya gives a shoutout to Wix for sponsoring the video, highlighting its versatility for creating various types of websites, from personal blogs to e-commerce stores, and how she could use it to sell her potential soap creations. She also humorously references her previous Wix website.
Safiya delves into the chemistry of soap making, explaining saponification – the reaction between oils and sodium hydroxide lye to create soap. She then introduces Soap Queen TV and Anne-Marie, the 'godmother' of online soap art tutorials, and selects a 'hanger-swirl soap' tutorial to follow, acknowledging the inherent dangers of working with lye.
After receiving supplies, Safiya prepares her hanger tool and mixes the colorants and fragrance oil. She then moves to the dangerous step of combining lye with water, carefully observing safety precautions. After mixing the lye water and oils, she realizes she over-mixed the soap batter, leading to a 'thick trace' that made the mixture unpourable and impossible to create art, labeling it a 'fail'.
Safiya begins a second attempt, aiming to avoid over-blending the soap batter. She quickly mixes the lye water and oils to achieve a thinner trace, then rapidly adds colorants and fragrance oil to each portion. She pours the dark blue soap into the mold, followed by alternating layers of white, light blue, white again, and finally yellow, noting some chunkiness but pushing through.
Safiya performs the hanger swirl technique within the opaque soap loaf, and adds a decorative swirl on top with leftover light blue soap. She then sprays the top with rubbing alcohol and places the loaf on a heating pad to ensure a gel phase for vibrant colors. The soap is left to cure for 48 hours before cutting.
After 48 hours, Safiya unmolds and cuts the soap loaf. While she observes some uneven layers and a slightly soft texture, she's surprised to find decent swirl patterns inside, including 'ocean wave' and 'half-right' hanger swirls. She notes a giant hair on the soap and the strong scent of crisp cotton. She admits the top of her soap, with its textured, sea-foam-like appearance, is a unique success.
Safiya concludes that her 12 bars of soap are 'okay,' acknowledging issues with uniformity, texture, and the challenges of the hanger swirl technique. She attributes some of the problems to underestimating the speed required for pouring and her inexperience with the loaf mold. Despite the difficulties, she enjoyed the process and expresses interest in making more soap, showing attempts at improving her technique. She thanks Wix again and encourages viewers to try soap making and support soap artisans.