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The earth provides us with a number of natural ingredients that can be used to colour soaps and creams. The following natural ingredients are particularly useful for muted colours. Dilute the colourings in a drop of warm water and then mix with a spoonful or two of your traced soap before adding this back to your main batch and mixing thoroughly. This will avoid a speckled effect.

CARROT POWDER	ORANGE
CAYENNE PEPPER	SALMON
COCOA POWDER	BROWN
COFFEE	BROWN
CURRY POWDER	YELLOW TO PEACH
GINGER POWDER	PEACH
MADDER	PINK
PAPRIKA	PEACH
SPIRULINA	GREEN
TURMERIC	CORAL

Two very useful gifts from nature are alkanet, which is a tree bark, and the seed annatto, commonly used to colour cheese. Both of these should be infused in warm sunflower or olive oil before use. Simply heat a cupful of oil and add ⅓ of a cupful of bark or seeds and leave this to infuse until it is deep purple, or yellow in the case of annatto. Alkanet will turn your soap anything from grey to a rosy lavender depending on the alkalinity of the soap whilst annatto gives you a warm sunshine yellow.

If you want to achieve bright colours there is no choice but to use cosmetic grade oxide powders or FD&C or D&C (food drug and cosmetic) grade manmade pigments. Oxides are sometimes sold as ‘natural’ but in reality they are an inorganic compound made up from synthetically prepared iron oxides that include some hydrated form of naturally occurring mineral deposits.

FD&C and D&C colourants are manmade but very tiny amounts are needed to colour your products. For this reason they are considered entirely safe.

When using oxides, dissolve approximately ¾ tsp in 28 g (1 oz) of warm distilled water – this is sufficient for a 1 kg (2 lb) batch of soap. When using FD&C and D&C colourants you need only enough pigment to cover the tip of a teaspoon dissolved in the same amount of water to produce quite a strong colour. Add these colours drop by drop at trace until you achieve the shade you want. For liquid soap and creams you can use liquid food colourants but be aware that only one drop of colourant will give you quite a strong colour.