Bath bomb colour planning (and avoiding brown water)
The dreaded brown bathwater....
Don't get me wrong brown has its charm (after all chocolate is mostly brown) but in bathwater.... let's avoid it as much as we can. With all the rainbows and giant gobs of colourful fizz sometimes when the foam settles the water can be... less fun. No one wants to sit in brown water... that should not be the end goal. So how do we avoid it? This can seem to stump people but with a little preplanning and colour picking you can have your awesome bath water too.
The Basic Colour Wheel
A basic way to start is when you are planning your biggest colours in your bombs. A yellow and blue bomb, awesome! easy! but a purple and orange bomb might have problems.
Now I am aware that people normally don’t only use six colours right? so let's say we want to use teal and coral? what then?
Secondary colours
Well here you will find most of those tricky colours hiding in the secondary colours (or close enough to) so you can work out if the teal is mostly blue-green... and the coral is going to be a light red... you are probably going to have problems, so maybe set one as most of the bomb with only a little of the secondary colour. There are always ways around the brown, sometimes it is working out ratios that still look good and work in the water.
Organising your colours to POP
So what is an easy way to pick colours? well, I have a solution for that also! Even the people who feel the least creative when it comes to colours can find solace in some simple rules. Let's delve into some colour theory and even some easy terms to search that might give you some ideas.
Colours to work with that make your bombs pop in colour
So this is the one we are all most familiar with and normally a starting point when people are looking for colour combos. Unfortunately, this is a recipe for the brown town. Once again these can be done with ratios after all everyone loves a good Christmas bomb. So what should we be looking for?
Colour schemes to try
Now here we have some interesting colour schemes and also some great new search terms for that google machine. You can quickly see here that analogous colours would make some pretty bathwater, but also if you used the Split complementary and did a green bomb with purple and orange drizzle it would look amazing.
The take-home message
So most important when planning your colours I would urge you to pick your ‘hero colour’ the one that will be more than 50% and then go from there. You can see this done mostly when complementary colours are used that it will be an uneven coloured bomb. For example, if you did a purple bomb and it has only 10% of orange you are probably going to be just fine. This is the key to it at the end of the day.
Bonus Tips and tricks!
If you’re making a bath bomb with all the colours of the rainbow, (the cloud bath bombs with rainbow embeds for example) you’ll end up very dark purple to black bathwater! However, depending on how much colour is in your embeds or bath bomb, you could end up with brown water also. To push the colours in the direction you would like the final water you can hide extra colours inside. Place a very heavily coloured purple embed inside, I call it my “colour corrector” It helps to get a nice final bath watercolour result rather than brown water.
Another trick is to use different types of colourants when making multi-coloured bombs. So as mentioned above, rainbows can make interesting (the polite word for muddy brown) final bath watercolours, but there’s another way to avoid that. For example, you‘re going to make a bath bomb with pink yellow and blue, chances are the bathwater will be grey. So we can prevent that by using different colourants! For the pink and blue part, you can use dye which will make purple water and then the yellow part can be a neon pigment. Neons look great in bath bomb form but don’t colour the water very much. So now you can have the best of both worlds!
Remember
Don’t be afraid of colour and experimenting, this is the fun bit! once you have a two colour bomb down, try adding a third keeping in mind the colour wheel and you will be just fine.
As always I would love to see what you come up with and hope you share your journey with us in our Facebook group.