Testing green micas

What I like about Pure Nature‘s micas, is that most of them work pretty well in cold process soap, and it’s true again this week with the green micas. They stayed fairly true to their original colour, with only one of them ending up a different shade of green. One thing you do need to be aware of is that despite the colourant being a mica, you don’t end up with the sparkly, glimmer effect of the mica in the soap. I mention this especially, because one of the colours is called Shimmer Green, so you might be expecting a shimmer in your soap. It turns a beautiful shade of pale green, but there no shimmer.

The four micas I tested this week are Apple Green, Designer Green, Green Fruit and Shimmer Green. As I do every week, I disperse them into rice bran oil before adding them to the soap. The oil really brings out the mica shimmer, a pity it doesn’t show up in the soap.

All four micas coloured the soap green, and only the Green Fruit mica ended up a different shade of green as the original mica colour. The mica has the typical green you expect in your coloured pencils or crayon box, but it ends up towards the blue-green end of the spectrum in cold process soap. A very pretty green though!

The Shimmer Green, as mentioned earlier, will turn the soap a nice pale green colour, but without the shimmer. And the Designer Green will give you the darkest shade of green, slightly towards the grey-scale.

The Apple Green is a nice bold, yellow-green, but seems to be affected by slight differences in temperature. I’m testing the soaps without them going through the gel-phase, which also has an effect on the colour, and I noticed a colour morphing within the soap. The side at the top of the picture, which shows a slight difference in colour to the rest of the soap, was positioned on the outside of the soap mold and would have had experienced the coldest temperature. So be aware of that. I’ll be posting about the gel-effect on colours later in this series, and the colour chart will have all the colours both gelled and un-gelled, so you will be able to predict your soap colours when designing your soap.

This week I’ll be posting two tutorials, a beautiful swirly green soap and a refreshing minty whipped butter for your feet. Both will be using micas from the greens I discussed today.