Question: What’s the differences between MP and CP Soap?

Since we’ve started this blog, I’ve posted a fair bit about soap. But, there is a big difference between our two current soap options.

1. CP soap- cold process soap
2. MP soap- melt and pour soap

There are other types of soap, but these are the two types we deal with at the moment.

CP soap, is made from the base ingredients- this might be confusing. So let’s change them up to something simpler. Baking. Cakes. Yum!

1. From Scratch (cp soap)
2. Box Cake (mp soap)

1) So you want to eat some cake. Yum! So you go to your kitchen and look at your cupboards. You’ve got eggs, flour, sugar, butter, baking soda and most importantly, cocoa powder (cause after all, homemade chocolate cakes are the best!). You toss them into a bowl and begin to stir. You add in some vanilla, and stir and pour into your prepared pan. Into your preheated oven it goes.

2) So you want to eat some cake. Yum! So you go to your kitchen and look in your cupboards. Oh wow! Easy! There’s a box of cake mix! You toss it into a bowl, add in the eggs, oil and water and mix. Then you pour it into your prepared pan, and into the preheated oven it goes.

And you’ve got cake! Now, cool and frosting each cake the same. When you eat it, there is a very good chance people would be able to tell the difference.

Are they the same? No.

Do they taste the same? No.

Do they have the same texture? No.

Do you get to control all the ingredients in both? No.

Do they cost the same to make? No.

Do they leave you with the same feeling when you eat them? No. Well… no. They leave you satisfied that you just ate cake. I find homemade cake to be more filling and more satisfying than box cake. I do make box cake from time to time! It’s much cheaper!!!

Let me begin this next part but saying I am 100% biased on this when it comes to cake making or soap making. I will always prefer my things to be made from scratch. I find they taste better and have more of a flare that pre-made stuff doesn’t have. But that also means the cost and time will be different too.

Butters, fats and oils… I get to control them.

Making CP soap

In cp soap, you get to choose each ingredient you add in. Each ingredient has a very specific purpose and reason for being there. Coconut oil is there for hardness and to try to get some bubbles as bubbles are what people want. Castor oil is there for it provides the bubbles with stability. We add some sugar to help get better bubbles. Kaolin Clay is there to give the soap a creamy feeling. Lard and tallow are used as it they are the best moisturisers in soap making, helps to combat the signs of aging, and is the most amazing skin food. And they provide wicked hardness to the bar which means long lasting. Shea butter, because people associate shea with good skin (and really, thats the only reason I toss it in! It is good, but there are better ingredients!). Olive oil is actually my filler in soaps. Then I get to choose things like colours, fragrances, extracts, herbs, do I pipe? do I add in coffee? Salt? This? That? The kitchen sink? Do I make it look like a bar? A food item? But then, you need to let it sit for about six weeks before you use it. And when you begin to mix… you could get an explosion, a volcano, seizing, ricing, acceleration, perfect trace… you really really never know what is going to happen when you make cp soap.

BEST part of MP soap? Colour no good? Melt it down!

In mp soaps, your base is pre-made. You don’t get to choose which ingredients go in. You can use it as is, or add in some colours, some fragrances, a little toy in the middle. Let it cool down for a few hours then use it that same day.

 

Do they perform the same? This is a very difficult one for me to answer as I can only speak for my skin. And my skin says no. 100% no. You couldn’t even pay me to use mp soap. Even if I were at someones isolated house on a mountain top and I ran out of my soap and had no way to get more, and all they had to bathe with was mp soap… I still wouldn’t use mp soap. My skin cannot stand it. I find it very drying.

Now that I’ve told you that my skin is biased in regards to soap, let me say, that some people really really like mp soap on their skin. They find it great and that it meets their skins needs. They find it perfect for them and they talk about how amazing it is. And let me just say I am suffering from envy at this moment. How I wish that were me! We are just beginning our mp soap journey and how I would love to have all those glorious and beautiful and artistic looking soaps to have in my bathroom for use, but I cannot. My skin won’t take it.

If we take a look at the differences in appearances, there are some really amazing and talented soap makers out there. Especially when it comes to mp soap. It’s amazing to work with! The art you can create with it is astounding! Your fragrance lasts longer and is more potent, and you don’t have to wait months or even years before first use. And you can see through your soap. How cool is that? And even I would want the funky looking stuff in my bathroom! Just to look at.

One day I’ll be able to do this!

CP soap on the other hand, you cannot see through. But! You can do so many different types of swirls and twirls and fun piping tricks and much more! You can play with embeds and design techniques to make it yours.

All soap is art! But at the end of the day, I drool more over mp soap, but some of our newer soaps coming out of The Scrub Me Down Kitchen are getting pretty neat!

Currently, nameless soap! But smells like candied passion fruit!

“Ancient Secrets”

“Cucumber Delights”

In our soaps we use mp soaps to make embeds in our cp soap. We carefully calculate our cp recipes to counteract the possible drying factor of the mp. In the future, we will also have a range of mp soaps in various scents and colours to help to brighten up the cp soap room! And my absolute favourite part of mp soaping? If you mess up, you just melt it down again and try again! In cp soaping, if you mess the design up, you won’t know for a day or two, and if you mess up the recipe? You won’t know for months!

My skin may not like MP soap, but good golly I wish it did! So until I can get . skin transplant, I will have to settle for adding cool stuff to our CP soap!