Due to some tricky wording on Amazon Prime, I stocked up on soap making supplies.

Tricky how? Well, if you opt for slower Prime shipping, you can earn $5.99 credit toward Prime Pantry. But you are not, it turns out, allowed to use that credit on anything but the flat $5.99 shipping rate. In other words, if you choose slow free Prime shipping, you build up credit to get a different kind of slow free Prime shipping.

I found this out after I’d happily filled up a Prime Pantry box with all kinds of oils that I thought I’d be getting for free. I went ahead and ordered that box, but never again.

You hear that, Amazon? Your wording is tricky, and I won’t stand for it!

The silver lining is that I got avocado oil and mango butter so I could make this avocado mango soap. I also ordered a case of pigments, so I can start dyeing my soap colors beside the usual shades of brown.

I cooked up a pound of the soap in my slow cooker, then separated it half. I mixed a little bit of green pigment in water, stirred it into the soap, and crammed it into a bar mold.

Then I did the same with yellow pigment.

Hot process soap is a pain to work with. I’ve mixed in ground coffee and oatmeal before, but color is tougher because it’s necessary to get more even coverage. I was also working with a smaller amount of soap, so it had a greater tendency to stick to the walls and dry out. I got it in the end, though.

And I was rewarded with these extremely ugly bars of soap. I think, as a rule, that hot process and individual bar molds just don’t mix. The soap’s too gloppy, and the mold relies on too much exposed surface area.

Out of the mold it’s not much prettier. The gloppiness thwarted my dreams of a bar that seamlessly transitions from yellow to green. At least it holds together.

After being used a few times it looks a lot more like what I set out to make. I think if I’d done cold process or even just a loaf pan, I would have had a much better time. The green has a tendency to run when it gets wet – I may have gone overboard with the pigment. It’s not dyeing me green, at least.

It’s full of those little white spots that I think come from the bottom of the slow cooker where the soap’s been heated to much. I’m still not sure how to get rid of them, or if I even should. I think they add some nice texture.

My fear is that I’m going to say the same thing about patches of uncured lye and burn my skin off…