Natural Soap Color

I've been making soap since '96 and got really good at it around 1999-2000. Why did it take so long to get good? Because I'm stubborn. I read the soap making books, and then did whatever I wanted to, spending most of my time experimenting and playing with natural and unnatural colorants, essential oils and fragrance oils, weird infusions, and figuring out cpop on my own. It was an accident, that first cpop. I was trying to make a completely natural, non-chemical (ha!) melt and pour without cooking the soap in a crockpot. I made plain unscented soap, poured it into a wooden mold, then put it in a hot oven. I had the cleanest oven on the block because of all of the blown-out batches that poured molten soap all over the inside of the oven. It took about a week before I figured out that turning on the oven to get it hot and then turning it off as I put the soap in would stop those soap explosions. I was able to get one soap batch that would melt somewhat like a melt and pour, and then I stopped working on it. One experiment down, a million more to go. After years of experimentation and failed batches, I felt like nobody could tell me anything about soap making that I didn't already know ~ hahahahahahahaha! Okay. Have you seen the soap some people are making today? With embeds and swirl and layer designs and brilliant colors and infusions of energy and on and on and on. It's remarkable. At the beginning of my soap making journey, I joined a lot of soap making groups on Yahoo. I finally narrowed the scope of the groups to only those discussing all-natural everything soaps. One big issue was getting nice color from natural sources. Soaps were pretty much differing shades of brown due to the color of the essential oils or the lack of understanding of some of the materials that were used as colorants. Beetroot powder, for example, is absolutely brilliantly red, and I cannot adequately relate the number of times new soap makers were cautioned against using it to color soap if they're expecting that gorgeous red. What you do get in cold process soap when using beetroot powder is maybe a very muted sort'a pink, but more often than not, you get beige. There are some pretty fabulous natural colorants that make a big visual impact -- turmeric, for example, stays true to color. Charcoal is good for stark black. Clays retain their color in soap, so if you're using green clay, your soap will be green by day's end. One of the new colorants I just learned about is avocado seed decoction. If you simmer a few avocado seeds for about an hour, hour-and-a-half, the water turns red. If you add that red water to your soap base, your soap will come out pink. Nicely pink. So there you go. An old dog can learn new tricks.