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Luxury Soap Studio

Kit Overview

Using lab tools, moulds, colours and professional ‘pigment’ and clear soaps, design your own fabulous soap sculptures, rainbow soap gifts, and gorgeous shapes embedded in crystal soap. All perfect for bath and shower time.

  • Age Group: 8+
  • Branches of Science: Chemistry, Life Science
  • Kit Code: WS/16L
  • Luxury Soap Studio Details & FAQS

Create multicoloured soap creatures and flowers that float in transparent bars. Blend colours and perfume for your own signature soap. Mould and ‘weld’ together multi-part soap sculptures. Make unique gifts for friends. This kit contains enough materials for the many amazing soap projects & sculptures in the booklet.

See Luxury Soap Studio FAQ's
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Luxury Soap Studio help

Luxury Soap Studio FAQ's

The soap has a specific melting point, when the soap is cooled to the melting point it would get solid(get set). The ambient temperature(air temp.) and the degree of heating up by microwave are factors to the results. When you find the soap is getting set too quick(This means the soap is not hot enough or air temperature is too cold), please follow the instruction and have the soaps microwaved for 5secs more per time to test.

We are sorry but compliance laws say we are not allowed to sell ingredients separately from the kit, and glycerine base soap with no colour or scent is not usually available in retail outlets. The ‘Luxury Soap’ or ‘Practical Joke Soap’ kit might still be available from some online sources near you. The same soap is in both kits. That would supply you with what you need, but again they might be rare items now.
You can try buying clear glycerine based soaps and melting them in the microwave very carefully. Check out the contents labels on soaps at the shop counter! Glycerine over the counter is not the same sadly. It is just a thick slightly sweetish liquid.

We think there may be several reasons the big beaker, and then it seems a smaller beaker, melted.
1. If children enter timings on microwave ovens they often make a mistake in the ‘decimal’ point. So for 10 seconds they end up with actually entering 1 minute or even 10 minutes. Hence we advise an adult is present at all times

2. The initial very important calibration step for the microwave is done by adults on page 5 in the large beaker with 6 blocks of soap, melting on high for 20 seconds under continuous observation. This allows you to work out the relative power of your oven compared to the standard one we used for the booklet. All incremental heating steps then happen at 5 second intervals. It seems that the issues happened some weeks after the first tryout. Maybe your ‘best’ timings had been forgotten? We know from our own testing that we got very confident and whizzed along churning out crazy soap designs and not always keeping an eye on the oven. We occasionally had ‘boil overs’, but never burning.

3. We strongly advise on page 5 that you watch the soap continuously as it is melting to make sure it is not boiling up and over. If at any stage, on any page, it does boil and boil until it is dry, the water content of the soap blocks will be driven off leaving the glycerine in the soap which can fuse almost like sugar ( to which it is related). The temperature will rise, and it will melt the most heatproof of plastic beakers . We do know that it is hard seeing into some microwave ovens, so that is why we insist on incremental heating at 5 seconds at a time. Maybe it was difficult seeing what was happening?

4. If you melt and re-melt glycerine soap many many times, it gradually loses its normal water content. This means it may melt faster in fact. Maybe after a lot of play, this is what happened to your small beaker some time later? Even more reason to keep an eye on things as they are heating.

Our beakers are designed to withstand about 120 degrees C. This is way above the melting point of soap. BUT you can ‘cook’ a hole in the beaker under certain conditions.
1 Do not heat and reheat very small amounts of soap. Natural water in the soap base is driven off each time, and the melting point can rise.
2 Only reheat when the soap and beaker are completely cooled down. If you keep repeating heating cycles without cooling, the soap can overheat.
3 Best heat the soap less than 10 secs per time when there is small amount of soap in beaker.
4 VERY IMPORTANT Clean out any residual and spilled soap in the heating tray before heating. It will gradually ‘dry out’ and melt a hole in the beaker.

This sometimes happens to the yellow coloured dye when it gets too cold. Just shake it and warm it up in your hands, or keep it in a warmer place.

Soap Kit uses a clear glycerine soap base. The intense white titanium dioxide soap pigment is inorganic and used in the best soaps and cosmetics. Kids mix it in to make the soap opaque and suitable for coloring using vegetable based pigments. Thus we believe it is also OK for vegans.

Yes you can use the Aga! But be careful ‘cos the soap can get too hot if you melt it in a pan on the Aga plates. Or on any stove or cooker ring! The best way is to put the soap blocks in a small pan. Get a big pan and put hot water in it from the tap . Then float the small pan inside the big pan and put it on the Aga. This is called a double boiler. Don’t let water get into the soap. When the soap blocks have totally melted and it is all runny, then you can fill your moulds. BUT try not to let drips of hot water get in the moulds too.

Making the soaps without a microwave oven needs a little bit more attention to safety. But please don’t use the conventional oven as you might melt the beakers too! We suggest getting a wide saucepan and putting in only about 1 or 2cm of water. NOW ADULTS MUST TAKE OVER.

Heat the water to near boiling. Then place the saucepan on a heat proof mat on the kitchen bench.

Carefully place the beaker (s) with soap lumps inside, upright in the hot water. If the water is too deep, the beaker will tip over.

You have made a ‘hot water bath’!
If you chop the soap into smaller lumps it melts more quickly.
You may need to reheat the water from time to time.
ALSO
You can also melt soap directly in a small dry saucepan, but we find this wastes a lot of soap!

If you overcook it for a long time, it may suddenly get VERY hot and maybe even melt our microwave quality beakers. So please take the following precautions:

1. ADULTS PLEASE CHECK THE TIMES PUT INTO THE MICROWAVE:
If children enter timings on microwave ovens they often make a mistake in the ‘decimal’ point. So for 20 seconds they end up with actually entering 2 minutes or even 20 minutes. 2 minutes, the hot glycerine will damage the beaker, 20 minutes may melt it and cause it to burn!
2. ADULTS PLEASE TEST YOUR MICROWAVE
The initial very important calibration step for the microwave is done by adults on page 5. Use the large beaker with 6 blocks of soap, melting on high for 20 seconds under while YOU WATCH. This allows you to work out the relative power of your oven compared to the standard one we used for the booklet. If it boils over, no harm done, but reduce the time next time. It should NOT boil over. All further heating steps then happen at 5 second intervals, WHILE YOU WATCH.

3. MELTING AND RE-MELTING SOAPS MANY TIMES
If you melt and re-melt glycerine soap many many times, it gradually loses its normal water content. This means it may melt faster and get hotter than the original soap. So please heat in 45 second bursts WHILE YOU WATCH.