Madero Negro Luxury Natural Cosmetics: Testing...testing...Blue colorant pictorial

I went to the produce/meat/ice cream store the other day (did I mention I live in a really small town?) and my daughter saw these really cool looking "vegetable" colorants. I of course could not stop myself and bought some...specially because of the bright blue one

Red, green and blue vegetable colorants

And having read the Soapmaker's Companion book recently I remembered Susan had a nice one bar recipe I could follow to test it. So yesterday I set myself the challenge to thoroughly test the blue colorant which is the one the I want desperately

Me ready for action :)

I did three tests with an additional recipe for control.
First test: colorant in oils

Pre-coloring oils

Adding color (three 1/8 tsp)

Oils after adding color

Lye water added - emulsified stage

Trace :(

Not very blue :(

Test #2: colorant in lye water

Pre-colorant

Pre-mixing colorant in - changed to reddish brown as soon as it came in contact with lye

Colorant mixed in

Very similar results - colorant in lye is the one on the right, colorant in the oils is the one on the left

Test 3: Colorant at trace

Nice trace - I mixed in the colorant at this point

Completely different results - got a nice teal with blue sprinkles

Control bar: did this one to have a comparison point of just how white the resulting bar is

No color added to the bars on the right

I was pretty disappointed with the results, I couldn't get anywhere near to the original blue color. I did notice when washing the mixer and cups the lye mixture turned a nice blue color when it came in contact with the water. When the bars are cured I hope they do the same, it would be a cool marketing tool for the soap.

This morning I went to check my experiment and got a really pleasant surprise

Color morphed to a really pretty purple

The colorant in lye and colorant in oil bars turned a really pretty purple - a definite keeper!! Colorant at trace was not so pretty, it looked weird but nice also.