Some time ago we were contacted by the fantastic soap maker Nicole from Les savons de Nicole she wanted to try Woad to make a blue soap. We have been looking into new and more affordable natural blue dyes and were really exited to try out Logwood and pass some onto Nicole to try Logwood soap making. However, when it arrived we were disappointed to discover that the logwood powder was a deep and rich brown.
We offered Nicole some of our Madder to have a play with instead and you can read about the results here. We are often surprised at the beautiful and unusual results we get when playing around with natural colours but Logwood was one of the most surprising I have come across yet. When testing out the colour on a piece of fleece I discovered, on rinsing, that the water ran out a deep red and left us with a beautiful, solid dark blue!
The process
I was very exited offer Nicole a sample of Logwood to have a play with. What happened with the soap was even more interesting, she sent us photographs of the process showing us the soap making process showing us the dye in the oils, the water and the water and lye.
Oils 
Water 
Water and Lye
The results looked very promising and the soap batter had a lovely deep blue colour.
Finished Product – Logwood Soap
Anyone who has worked with natural dyes will know that there is always that exiting moment when you get to see how your project has turned out, you never quite know what you are going to get and in the case of logwood soap the result looks…well, kind of like chocolate. Although not the blue we were hoping for we still love these beautiful soaps Nicole sent us, they smell amazing and they look almost good enough to eat!
Special Thanks to Nicole from Les savons de Nicole for the wonderful soap, we look forward to more exiting experiments in the future. If you would like to try out our range of natural dyes you can find them here.
Hello,
I am a soap hobbyist and also looked into Royal Logwood, but for a purple rather than blue. My results were similar to Nicole’s – a light chocolate.
Further experimentation found that both Cape Jasmine powder and Lac Resin Powder provide nice purples.
Hope this is helpful to any others searching for a purple colorant 🙂
Be safe, be healthy, be happy
Craig
Hello. I know this is pretty old, but hopefully you can answer my question 🙂 Did she use both an oil infusion AND lye “infusion” for the same batch? Because most botanicals work far better in soap making if they’re infused only into the oils. The only botanicals I can think of that work well in lye are indigo and madder root. If that is what she did, she should’ve done two separate batches, because this only shows that it doesn’t work adding it to the lye, and she may have used a very weak oil infusion. I think it would be worth another try using only an oil infusion.