Teach Soap

Have been wanting to try making CP soap with 100% coconut milk. Trying to find the threads on this forum, in regards to measuring the amount needed. Is it by weight or by volume?
Any advice will be greatly appreciated.

Here's a guest blog post about making milk soaps (incl. coconut milk) from the recent HSMG Conference: . In this case, Joanna Schmidt is using 50% coconut milk, 50% water. Because coconut milk soap can burn and/or overheat, it's a pretty tricky batch to make. She's mixing the lye with only the 50% water portion, then adding the lye water and coconut milk separately to the oils. I would always measure by weight.

Anne-Marie had some adventures with coconut milk soap overheating, so heads up:

Always go by weight, not volume.

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Irena
Closed minds are like faulty parachutes; they refuse to open.

Thanks Robert and Irena. The blog posted on SQ is very informative.

I use coconut milk in all my soaps now. I prefer to use full coconut milk but that took some experimenting to get. For your first batch I would use half and half with water. It can be hard to tell if your lye is dissolving fully and there is the chance of overheating. Once you've used it a few times then you know. For it's a lot different then when I used goats milk. I freeze the coconut milk until slushy/almost fully frozen then add the lye slowly in small increments and stir and stir and stir some more to make sure it mixes fully. While you are waiting for it to cool it can change to varying shades of orange (depending on how much you use) and thicken so just keep stirring occasionally until it's cool enough. I pop my soaps in the fridge to prevent gel and overheating. Love coconut milk in the soap. It adds a silkiness to the bubbles and feels great.

Experimented this past weekend. I attempted the 50/50 method using slushied coconut milk..It traced really fast. Thankfully it never scorched. Need to do more trials, which is always a bonus, and slow down trace to get a pattern/swirl on. Thanks again to all whom gave me advice and suggestions.

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Linda
I know the voices in my head aren't real, but they sure have some great ideas!