Dead Sea salt appears in many bath and cosmetic products. Many believe salts harvested from the Dead Sea possess healing and rejuvenating properties. If you want to develop recipes for cold pressed soap (also known as cold process soap) that use Dead Sea salt, you can take a couple of different approaches. Each approach will yield a distinctive batch of soap with different qualities.
Dissolved Salt Recipes
One method you can use to add Dead Sea salt to your cold-pressed soap recipes entails dissolving salt in water and adding it to your lye solution. Adding salt in this manner will help your bar to harden and create lots of lather.
In order to develop cold-pressed soap recipes with dissolved Dead Sea Salt, you will need to use 3 tbsp. salt for every 6-pound batch of soap. The other ingredients essential to creating a successful batch of soap with dead sea salt are either animal or vegetable fats, or a combination of the two, lye, water or milk, and any essential oils, fragrances and add-ins you want to use.
Once you determine what fat or combination of fats you want to use in your Dead Sea Salt soap recipe, consult a lye calculator to determine how much lye you should use to cause saponification, or the process by which fat becomes soap.
Finally, you must determine how much liquid you need to dissolve the lye. If you dissolve the lye in water, use a 1:3 ratio of water to fats. If you choose milk as your liquid use a 1:2 ratio of water to fats.
To maintain the liquid-to-fat ratio, you need to account for the liquid you use to dissolve the Dead Sea Salt. Subtract it from the total amount of liquid and use the remaining amount to dissolve the lye.
Once you have a basic recipe you can incorporate essential oils and add-ins. Depending on the essential oil you choose, use between .7 and .9 ounces per pound of finished soap. The amount of add-ins, such as dried herbs and textured materials, you choose to incorporate will depend on what kind of look and texture you want your finished cold-pressed soap to have.
Add-in Recipes
If you use Dead Sea Salt as an add-in, you can use the same basic recipe as for the dissolved salt, but instead of dissolving your salt and adding it to your lye solution before it has even become soap, you can add some to a nearly finished batch to create a textured, exfoliating soap.
Cold-pressed soap recipes that count Dead Sea Salt as an add-in give you more freedom to decide how much salt you want to use. Since you will add undissolved coarse salt crystals after you've combined your dissolved lye and melted fat and stirred until the mixture begins to trace (the near-finished point when you can draw a light line across the mixture's top), they will not affect your soap's hardness. Instead, they will complement the other add-ins and essential oils you decide to use in your recipe.
The amount of Dead Sea Salt you use as an add-in will depend on how coarse you want your soap's surface to be. Experiment with each batch until you perfect the amount.
