Getting started with Bath & Body
Set up your Bath & Body workspace, stock your oils, lye and preservative pantry, choose a soap or lotion method, build a recipe with Ellie, and make your first batch safely — the whole loop, start to finish.
Bath & Body — soap bars, liquid soap, lotions, bath bombs, and scrubs — is fully supported in Hi Ellie. It's the same pantry, the same wizard, and the same Ellie you'd use for resin or candles, just tuned for oils, lye, fragrance, and preservatives. This guide walks the whole loop.
Switching to your Bath & Body workspace
Your studio can hold more than one craft. At the top of the app there's a row of craft tabs — a Dashboard tab plus one per craft you make in. Tap Bath & Body to make it active.
Once Bath & Body is active, everything craft-specific follows it: your recipe library, the pantry categories, and the wizard all switch to soap. If you don't see a Bath & Body tab yet, add it as a craft during onboarding or from your studio setup.
Stock your pantry
Ellie can only build with what you actually have, so the pantry comes first. On top of the shelves every craft shares, a Bath & Body workspace unlocks:
- Oils & Butters — your carrier oils and butters (olive, coconut, castor, shea, and so on).
- Lye — your sodium hydroxide (NaOH, for hard bars) or potassium hydroxide (KOH, for liquid soap), with its purity.
- M&P Bases — your melt-and-pour blocks (clear, white, goat's milk, and so on) — no lye handling required.
- Fragrance Oils and Essential Oils — your scents, each with usage guidance.
- Bath Ingredients — additives like coffee grounds, oatmeal, coarse salt, botanicals, and clays.
- Preservatives — required for any lotion or other water-based batch, with its on-file effective rate and pH range.
Add items by hand, from a spreadsheet, or by snapping a label. Lye and Preservatives carry real safety rules — read the two articles linked below before your first batch.
Ellie's welcome setup can stock your first shelves for you. With Bath & Body active, its first screen asks What will you make first? and offers three tiles:
- Soap from scratch — adds your first oil or butter, then your lye.
- Melt & pour — adds your first M&P base.
- Bath & body extras — adds your first ingredient for bath bombs, scrubs, or lotions.
Every path then adds an essential oil and confirms your experience level. The two bar paths also offer an optional mold. Setup ends with a choice: open the Ellie Wizard, or look around first. You can skip any shelf step, and a shelf that already holds something is skipped for you. If you close the setup partway, a Finish setting up your studio with Ellie banner on your dashboard picks it back up. To run it again later, go to Settings and choose Restart welcome tour.
Choose how you're making it
When you start a recipe, you pick a method:
- Melt & Pour (M&P) — a pre-saponified base you melt, color, and pour. No lye handling, no cure.
- From scratch: Cold Process, Hot Process, or Liquid — you mix oils with a lye solution yourself. These need lye.
- Lotion, bath bomb, or scrub — no lye, but a lotion is water-based and needs a preservative.
Only the from-scratch methods touch lye — Melt & Pour, bath bombs, and scrubs don't.
Build a recipe with Ellie
Open the Ellie Wizard and describe what you want — a bar, a lotion, a scent direction — and Ellie builds a recipe grounded in your pantry. For a from-scratch method, she works the lye math with you in conversation (each oil's weight times its SAP value, adjusted for superfat), but she never hands you a final authoritative number — you carefully double-check the exact amount yourself before mixing. For a lotion, she computes the minimum preservative dose from your own pantry pick, never an invented number.
Make your first batch — safely
Before you can save a from-scratch (Cold Process, Hot Process, or Liquid) recipe, Hi Ellie shows you a lye acknowledgment with your batch's computed lye and water weights — at every experience tier, with no way to skip it. See Working safely with lye.
A lotion's preservative floor works differently: Hi Ellie computes the minimum preservative weight from your own pantry pick and shows it on the recipe, and the manual lotion form refuses the save until you pick one — but a lotion the wizard couldn't dose still saves. It is stopped at the batch instead: Start a Batch refuses a lotion with no preservative, or one whose preservative has no usable rate on file, and completing a lotion batch asks for the finished batch's measured pH before it will close. See Preserving water-based batches safely.
Cold-process bars cure for weeks before they're ready to use. Hi Ellie's guidance is 28 to 42 days for cold and hot process — cold process needs the full window to fully saponify and harden, and hot process is usable sooner but still benefits from a shorter cure; ask Ellie about cold process specifically and she'll put it as 4 to 6 weeks. Each recipe carries its own cure target, which starts the clock when you complete a batch; the app only clamps that target into a storable range (14–60 days for cold process, 7–60 for hot), and the bottom of that range is a limit, not a target.
Heads up: never skip the lye acknowledgment or the preservative step to save time — they're safety checks, not paperwork.