The Mixture Of

Ampalaya and
Malunggay
(Whitening Soap)

Princess Danica F. Gabon

9-1
Mrs. Valenzuela
ABSTRACT
It has been observed that people nowadays are very much concern with the
appearance and color of their skin, so our group decided to invent a new kind of soap.
We can offer it to the people to help make their skin whiter, softer and fairer at an
affordable price. We used one whole ampalaya, half pound of malunggay leaves, lye,
coconut oil and lavender fragrance. We cut the ampalaya into pieces and mixed with a
little amount of water and blended it. Then we chopped and minced half pound of
malunggay leaves. We put the ampalaya and malunggay leaves into separate bowls.
We mixed a little amount of water into the lye and left it to chill. We put the coconut oil in
a pot and heated it and after heating we put it in another container and slowly add the
lye with it and mixed them vigorously for about an hour and a half and put the blended
ampalaya and minced malunggay into the mixture and continuously stirring the mixture
until it became more liquid. After mixing all the ingredients, we add lavender fragrance
oil into the mixture then put in into a soap mold and covered it with cloth to make it hard.
After a few days the soap hardened and we took it from the mold and set it in a dry
place to cure for about two months. After two months, the soap is now ready to be used.

BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY

Here in the Philippines, the production of beauty soaps has increased as time
passed. Cheche V. Moral of the Philippine Daily Inquirer said that skincare in the
Philippines is twenty two billion pesos market and in 2004, Synovate, a global market
research company, conducted a survey wherein Filipino women has the highest rate of
50% usage of whitening products among Hong Kong, Malaysia, South Korea, and
Taiwan. Filipinos see fair skin and young skin, as one of the standards of beauty and
being attractive has become a basis of being accepted in the society because most
people will judge you by the way you look. It seems like there is discrimination within our
society. Frankie, a blogger from skinbeautifulblog.wordpress.com, has stated a few
considerations of why it is so important to be beautiful. She said, “attractive people are
more likely to have dates and have many friends” and “attractive people are 2-5 times
more likely to be hired for a position” while “unattractive people are most likely to be
assumed or accused of committing a crime.” Advertisements are also one of the factors
that made us think that fair skin is beautiful. Like the Ponds commercial, it promises a
more desirable you if you purchase and use their beauty products. Another factor is the
influence of the Spaniards. They have this colonial mentality that people with fair skin
are privileged. A lot of Filipinos purchase this expensive soap for the benefit of having a
beautiful skin although it is a big addition to an individual's expenses. One bar of papaya
whitening soap costs 80-290 pesos and it only lasts 1-2weeks. One of the most famous
whitening soaps is Pervil Soap that costs 100-120 pesos.
Statement Of Objectives
This investigatory project aims to make alternative organic beauty soaps.
Nowadays, Philippines are in the state of being economically challenged because in the
first semester of 2012, 27.9% of the population in the Philippines is below the poverty
line. Since Filipinos could not afford expensive beauty products, this investigatory
project aims to help the society meet their wants and their small budgets by creating a
beauty soap using ampalaya and malunggay therefore we also aim to make it cheaper
than other beauty products in the market today. In order to achieve this, we need to
search for the contents of the beauty products and the two vegetables and then study
what that nutrient or ingredient does for our skin. The knowledge of this will lead us to
having our hypothesis of the product. People tend to avoid these herbs because of its
unlikely taste but our experiment will prove that ampalaya and malunggay are still useful
to the body without consuming it and that it can possible and effective as skincare
products by conducting an experiment.

Significance of the Study

The importance of this study is to use one of the healthiest and most
unnoticeable veggies as skincare soaps. Skin is one of the body parts that keep us
healthy. To take care of our skin, we daily use soaps to clean off those dirt, odors, and
germs. We need to wash away the germs to prevent it from getting under the surface of
our skin. Using the healthiest vegetables to become a daily used soap, maybe the
biggest breakthrough of skin care products. This study is for everyone in our society but
most of it is the ones who want to achieve fair skin and remove fine-lines. One of ABS-
CBNnews.com's articles, "White Skin Comes With A Price"by Leilani Chavez, says that
a 26-year-old female named Jeimie had used almost all the whitening products in the
market. She started trying whitening products since her early 20's even though she was
born with a fair-complexion. She uses whitening products to maintain her skin color.
People, who are in 20's, both female and male, can have the benefit of having their
skins whitened by our product. Then at the age of the 20’s, with all the work and stress,
the question “when will my wrinkles show?” will pop-out of your mind. Women and men
in 20’s could really have wrinkles. There are some 20-year-old adults who already gets
surgical procedures to remove or avoid getting wrinkles so as you can see, not only 40’s
adults gets wrinkles according Tanya Sharma from skincare.lovetoknow.com. So with
the help of our beauty soap, they could also remove their fine-lines.

Scope and Delimitation

We have studied a few things to support our idea of making an ampalaya-
malunggay soap. Our study covers the content of ampalaya, malunggay, and beauty
products. We studied each ingredient's use to our skin. This serves as proof that our
idea could be possibly made but it does not mean that it is proven effective. Our study
does not cover the external effectiveness of ampalaya and malunggay on our skin. We
also studied the production and usage of whitening products in the Philippines to know
how much help could our product be, in our society because our aim is to use the worth
of these vegetables as a convenient beauty soap. Lastly, we have to examine the ways
of making soaps in order to create our very own recipe of ampalaya-malunggay soap.

Materials Ingredients
One whole Ampalaya or Bitter Melon
Malunggay
About 55grams of Lye
200ml of mineral water
500 ml of Minola coconut oil
20ml of lavender fragrance oil Materials ·
6 round stainless molds ·
Glass stirring rod ·
Glass measuring cup ·
2 large pots Procedure
We decided to make our soap out of a few organic ingredients. We started off by
cutting one whole ampalaya into pieces with a knife and setting it aside. Then we took
the malunggay leaves off its stems. After that, we put them into separate bowls and
blended them separately in the blender. We put a little water with our ampalaya so that
it becomes a thick liquid while our malunggay needed extra cutting to become minced
after being blended because we needed it to become dry bits.
After we set those aside, we put our gloves on and dropped about fifty grams of
lye into two hundred milliliters of water. We observed the chemical reaction as we
dropped the lye in the water our solution heats up. We mixed it until the mixture’s cloudy
appearance disappears. And while the lye is almost ready, we then put five hundred
milliliters of coconut oil in a pot to heat because the temperature of the oil needs to be at
least five to ten Celsius apart from the temperature of the lye and if not, it can also react
and burn. When the oil was heated, we put it in a separate container and slowly put the
lye with it.
We mixed it very vigorously for about one and a half hour. As we mixed it, the
mixture becomes dark. Then we put the blended ampalaya and minced malunggay into
the mixture. After that, we stirred it again with a spoon just until it became one whole
green liquid base. It had an unpleasing smell to it so we also added about ¾ of a twenty
milliliters of lavender scented fragrance oil to the mixture.
 Then we finally poured it into the molders and set it aside with a cloth on top of
the molds so that it absorb the substances that it will release and help the increase the
speed of hardening the soap. After a few days, the soap hardened enough for us to be
able to take them out of their molds so we took them out of their molds then set it in a
dry place to let the soap cure for about two months so it can finally be used.

Summary
In summary, the experiment still turned out to be pretty successful. For our first
time making soap, the results were very good. The outcome was not perfect for a few
reasons like the solution seemed burnt, the mixture didn’t reach trace with our efforts of
mixing and the soap itself looked a little bit too oily which could have caused it to not
solidify properly but it’s actually fine. Our oil turned out to be too hot compared to the lye
solution so the lye reacted to the oil and burned. Then after that we think that we did not
stir the mixture properly enough to the stage that it would be able to be molded into
soap or is called by soap makers as “trace”. Soap making is not an easy task to do
specially because you are dealing with lye or sodium hydroxide that is a very reactive
chemical. Our goal was to make cheap and organic skin care soap. But the truth is that
there is really no such thing as a one hundred percent “organic soap” because the main
ingredient needed for it is lye, which is a chemical itself. We conclude that making soap
is fun and can be easy but requires much research before even daring to deal with it.
Our group definitely did not lack in research but we were short on some materials. We
did not have a thermometer at that instance which is important for people who aren’t
experienced in making soap and measuring the temperature of the lye and oil so the
mixture burnt a little bit and that is why we think that our soap solution did not reach
saponification properly. We also did not have an electric mixer that is required when
making soap so that the solution thickens up easily and that is the reason we assume
why the solution just did not thicken at all. We learnt through the experiment that exact
measurements were really needed so that the mixture saponificates.