Melt & Pour soap
Three steps, no lye, no cure — how the Melt & Pour flow works, what your base contributes, and why it's the one soap method with an ingredient statement.
Melt & Pour starts from a base that is already soap. Someone else did the saponification; you melt the block, colour it, scent it, and pour it into a mold. That makes it the one from-the-shelf soap method with no lye handling, no lye acknowledgment, and no cure — a M&P bar is usable the day you pour it. Hi Ellie allows it a cure target of 0–3 days all the same, the same band it gives liquid soap: a short rest to cool and firm up, never a bar cure.
The three steps
The Melt & Pour flow is flat — no Guided / Collab / Advisor split, because there is no lye math to scale guidance for. Three steps:
- Your base — picked from your M&P Bases shelf. Blend two or more and set the ratio; the wizard offers an even split as a starting point and you can adjust each line's share.
- Scent — fragrance oils, essential oils, or a blend.
- Colour, add-ins, size and mold — colorants and bath ingredients, plus how much you're making.
The mold on that last step is optional — it pre-fills your batch size from the mold's real capacity. Skip it and type the size yourself; the batch-size field is always there.
A lower scent ceiling than from-scratch
Melt & Pour bases carry a lower fragrance ceiling than from-scratch soap: 3% of the base weight, against 6% for a cold- or hot-process bar. It's a conservative default — no field on the M&P base shelf carries a per-base ceiling today, so the app does not pretend to read one off your supplier's block.
It is also a hard limit, not a warning. A recipe above the ceiling is refused at Save, in the wizard and on the manual form alike, and the manual form tells you while you're still typing rather than at the end. There is no override.
See Scenting a Bath & Body recipe.
Your base's INCI list is what makes the label work
Each M&P base on your shelf can carry two things a from-scratch bar cannot:
- A regulatory class —
cosmeticorsoap. A true soap bar is exempt from cosmetic ingredient labeling in the US; a cosmetic-classed base is not. - An INCI ingredient list, copied word for word from your supplier's published list.
When you print a label from a cosmetic-classed M&P recipe, that supplier list is the backbone of the ingredient statement — and it's the reason a Melt & Pour label has one while a cold-process bar's doesn't. See Ingredient statements and compliance.
Heads up: an M&P base with no stored INCI copy contributes nothing to the statement — not a guess, not a placeholder. If the label matters to you, transcribe the supplier's list onto the base's pantry row (or bring it in on the M&P Bases sheet — see Bulk import and export).
What Melt & Pour skips
| Melt & Pour | From-scratch | |
|---|---|---|
| Lye on your bench | No | Yes |
| Lye acknowledgment before save | No | Yes, every tier |
| Superfat / SAP math | No | Yes |
| Cure | No bar cure — 0–3 days at most, to cool and firm up | 28–42 days guidance (CP needs the full window to fully saponify and harden; HP is usable sooner but still benefits from a shorter cure); the recipe's own target, clamped into 14–60 (CP) / 7–60 (HP) |
That's the whole trade: less control over the soap's chemistry, and much less that can go wrong.