Teach Soap

I use glycerol stearate as an emulsifier and thickener, and bought the egd to do pearl effect in liquid soap (synthetic type, I don't know if it works in artesanal liquid soap - soapbuddy might know) but just in case anyone might want to thicken and pearlise, here are my notes.

I'm working on a sulphate-free body wash and so, I did an experiment using my cream shampoo as a base, and added 5% of each of the above to a pair of 100mL samples. Heated to 70C, blended at high speed, allowed to cool.

1. Glycerol stearate: thickened the shampoo nicely into a cream, but ruined the lather, made it useless in fact. I guess from this, that maybe the gs is a foam suppressant. I won't think about letting it near a foaming product again!

2. 5% ethylene glycol distearate was way too much! When it cooled, I had a soapy solid, not a liquid nor even a paste. Or maybe it is a superthick liquid; I can't tell. Anyway, I pulled some out of the beaker with my fingertips and spread it on my palm to test the lathering, and it was - imagine, say, an old piece of commercial soap that's been left in the water for a while so it's gone a sort of flexible waxy consistency and spreads out over your palm when you try to lather it? Like that. But quite foamy! Well, I know this chemical is commonly used by liquid soap manufacturers to make pearlescent soap. Maybe I should have expected it wouldn't depress the foam that much. But I will try with just 1% next time.

1% still too much! Resulted in something resembling plastic.
I tried 0.25% and this seems about right. It's incredible the thickening that this stuff produces.