How To Make Sea Moss Soap

Mobjack Bay

Sea moss is rich is carrageenan and is added to other food products to thicken them. I've used aloe gel with carrageenan in it as a replacement for half of the water in my soap. The gel would probably be fine as a full replacement, but I can't say since I haven't tried it. If it's gel/semi solid, you are going to need to get it to a liquid state. You could easily do a test run using it to replace half of the water in your recipe by using the "split method" where you mix your lye with an equal weight of water (or a little more water then Lye; by weight) and then use the other liquid as a replacement for the balance of the water weight called for in the recipe. The replacement liquid can be stick blended into the oils before you add the lye solution to the oils. If you decide to add the lye directly to the liquified sea moss gel, use a large container. Some replacement liquids can cause volcano-ing. Alternative liquids can also get very smelly, change colors or get gloppy when lye is added. You may need to experiment a bit with small batches until you find the best method.

Last edited: Jan 20, 2020

I warmed the sea moss in water then blended it and made frozen ice cubes to use in lye. Once I combined the lye and oils, it set up QUICKLY. That was my first batch.
Second batch I made sure the lye and oils were around 90 Degrees, I used less ice cubes and I did a light trace before adding essential oils and other ingredients. It set up quickly but not as quick. I'm going to try it again with a little less Sea moss ice cubes and see if that helps.

When something is supposed to have a lot of health benefits for the skin and is expensive and/or time-consuming to make, I tend to add it to hot process recipes after the cook just so the ingredient doesn't go to waste, i.e. much less of it gets destroyed by the lye (organic shea butter, argan oil, dragon's blood infused oil or any herb infused oils). Or, I'll add them to a purposeful rebatch. This is out of fear the lye might destroy some of the therapeutic properties. My first thought after learning about sea moss gel would be to add it after a cook - the water will evaporate out, but doing a water reduction in the beginning might mitigate that curing time issue. Does anybody know about adding sea moss gel in this way? I love making mermaid-themed bars and it sounds like a cool ingredient to add to sea-goddess-y soaps.