StillBath is about the slow half of soap making — the six weeks after the interesting part is over.
What this site is
Most soap tutorials stop at the pour. That is the fun bit, and it is also the bit that takes twenty minutes out of a process that takes six weeks. What happens after — how a bar hardens, why the colour shifts, why the batch you were proud of on Monday looks wrong by Friday — gets far less attention, and it is where most people give up.
So this site covers the whole arc. Cold process, hot process, melt and pour. Recipes with their oil formulations shown up front, so you know how a bar will behave before you commit an afternoon to it. Troubleshooting guides that tell you honestly whether a batch is salvageable or whether you should let it go.
How recipes here work
Every recipe shows percentages of total oil weight rather than gram measurements. That is deliberate. Percentages are useless until you run them through a lye calculator with your own batch size, and running the calculator is the step people skip. Publishing weights would make skipping it easy.
It means one extra step for you. It also means you learn to read a formulation, which is the thing that eventually lets you write your own.
On lye
Sodium hydroxide is genuinely dangerous. It causes severe chemical burns and permanent eye injury, and it does not care how many batches you have made. Every cold and hot process recipe on this site carries a safety notice, and it is not there for legal cover — it is there because the accidents that happen to experienced soap makers are the ones where they stopped bothering with goggles.
If you have never worked with it, read the safety guide before you read a recipe.
Colour
Everything on this site is coloured with plants and clays — indigo, madder root, spirulina, annatto, activated charcoal, rose clay. Not because synthetic colourants are bad, but because natural ones behave unpredictably, fade in interesting ways, and are more fun to write about.
Get in touch
Questions, corrections, or a batch that went wrong in a way I have not covered — send a message. Corrections especially. If something here is wrong I would rather know.