Making Candles & Soaps for Dummies

The For Dummies series of books started in the early 90's and was originally focused on I.T. Pretty quickly the black and yellow covers became regular features on every IT professional's bookshelf. Since then the range has been expanded to cover other topics from martial arts to music to maths, science and history. They've consistently been a good start point for everything from C Programming to Ukulele playing and there's about ten Dummies tomes on my bookshelves at the moment. So naturally when I decided to look at expanding my bee products to include soaps the first place I looked was Making Candles & Soaps for Dummies by Kelly Ewing.

Making Candles not Soaps for Dummies would've been more apt.

Unfortunately after years of using For Dummies books and having always found them excellent start and reference points it seems I've found the exception. Making soap involves adding lye to oils, I'm not going to pretend to understand the science of the saponification process but basically the lye acts on the oil turning it into soap. There's a couple of ways this can be done, either slowly at room temperature (cold process) or faster in a heated vessel (hot process). Different types of oil require different amounts of lye at different concentrations, then there's mixing different oils too and superfatting to consider - you could literally write a book on just that. However Kelly writes off cold process soap making as too dangerous on page 5 and makes no mention of hot process soap making at all.

I thought it a bit strange that a book on making soap completely fails to tell the reader how to make actual soap so I did a little googling and found that in the original Candle and Soap Making for Dummies Kelly had included instructions for cold process soap making but included a mistake in the order ingredients were combined to make the lye solution putting people at risk of burns from the exothermic reaction. As a result the Consumer Product Safety Commission recalled the book in 2003. This version I have is copyrighted in 2005 and the safety issue seems to have been addressed by simply removing the who topic and calling it to dangerous rather than just correcting the mistake which would've only needed a note to say: When making lye always add the Sodium Hyroxide to the water never the otherway round. Seems a bit overkill to me and really undermines the book. 

So, instead of writing about actual soap making there's a couple of chapters given over to melt and pour soaps and remilling soaps. Melt and Pour is simply buying ready made soap, melting it adding a few things if you like and pouring it into a mould, remilling is grating existing soap, adding water then remolding that too. Neither technique involves making your own soap. Basically it's tweaking and reshaping existing soap which is quite obviously not "making." There's some info on adding essential oils, fragrances, colours and other additives to the soap but that's pretty much your lot.

I wasn't really interested in the candle making chapters which make up the bulk of the book but had a look anyway. Whilst the authors was risk averse to the point of removing soap making she thinks nothing of decorating a wax candle held in one hand with a hot glue gun held in the other.. Don't think I'd be too comfortable sat near a burning candle decorated with hot glue to be honest -normally hot glue is non toxic but manufacturers warn that overheated it breaks down releasing different compounds that I don't think I'd want to sit in a cloud of.

The book does tell you how to make dipped, moulded and rolled beeswax candles and the section on wicks looks pretty comprehensive, there's also quite a lot on decorating candles and sections on scents and aromatherapy so people may get some use out of it although not probably enough to justify the cover price. Other missing topics include tallow which is easily made at home and has been used for both candle and soap making for a good five thousand years. I also didn't see any mention of Soy Wax either, which may be due to the age of the original text.

The brief About the Author sections notes that Kelly co-authored a few IT For Dummies books The Internet All-in-One Desk Reference for Dummies which has her name on the cover as well as having edited more than 75 books on different subjects. Whilst the author describes candle and soap making as a hobby my impression was that the book is made up of information that was collated for the sake of the book rather than written from personal experience and first hand knowledge accrued over time. The mistake with the lye making instructions in the original version is so basic (and dangerous..) that I don't really believe anyone familiar with the process would have published it.

So whilst I've normally found the For Dummies range really useful, as my bookshelf can attest, this book is the lemon in the series. Whilst it's apparently aimed at the beginner and the seasoned craft person I don't think it has enough information for either when it comes to soap making.