Teach Soap

Even though I've been making soap for years, I still consider myself a novice but think of my product as a good one. That was until the latest craft show when I swapped a bar of soap with another soapmaker and tried his product. His blew my socks off not only in bubbly and hardness, but how good my skin felt afterwards. That's when I started second guessing my age-old recipe. According to soap calc, all my numbers are within the right range but I want to make a decent soap, a great soap. So could you experienced soapers help me please!!

Here's my recipe in grams:

200 coconut oil (76 degree)
200 Lard
85 Canola Oil
85 Olive Oil
57 Palm Oil
113 Palm Kernel Oil
35 Castor Oil
13 Beeswax

With

114 Lye
294 Water

These are the oils I have access to and because of a bizarre twist of fate, I get most all of them for free because of the volunteer work that I do. So if possible, I would like to use what I have. Please help me make a better bar of soap.

Thank you!!!

Carmen

Hi! Just chiming in, someone else will probably swoop in and help you too, I am just a newbie who didn`t want to keep you hangin`on a saturday, lol

You have a lot of different oils in there, 8 of them in total, many of them are hard oils. Perhaps scale down a bit on the different oils?
Balance is good. Some of your oils are really cleansing and you have the most of those in your recipe (lard, coconut) In adition to including palm oils. Palm oil is often used to replace tallow or lard in a recipe but you have those allready in you recipe.

They make a hard bar of soap so you could easily skip one or two of them, or at least put them in at a much smaller ammount to reduce the cleansing that they will give, or superfat higher to counteract the cleansingprops.

And the palm kernel oil, do you need that when you allready have the palm oil, lard and coconut for hardness? Soapbuddy will correct me if I am wrong

Also, perhaps his soaps are supperfatted in a higher ammount than yours, and that he has added more castor oil for the sudsing action and moisture.
Castor is great for superfatting soap, it`s delish. Max at 25 %, although some claim no more than 10% to avoid stickyness (I have used 30%, never had any sort of stickyness at all in my soap, but it all depends on recipes, mine had a lot of coconut in it)

Also this person could use less ammount of different oils, sticking to between 3 or 5 oils to get a nice balance.

How much do you superfat? 5 %? I ran your recipe through soapcalc and ended up with 114.97 gr. lye at 5 % superfat, but the water was not as low your recipe, it was at 299.44 gr. Don`t know if you did a water redux.

If this wasn`t helpfull, or you felt I picked on your recipe, that was not my intention - my apologies! Just wanted to help you troubbleshoot.


Wish you all the best in your quest for the perfect recipe!

Oracle. This may sound bizarre to you but I traded soap with someone at a craft show in western PA that had the word "Oracle" in their name. If you're from this area please send me a PM.

Regarding your recipe. I concur with Olivia. Palm is the vegetable version of Lard so it defeats the purpose using both. You're also loaded with hardening oils. Canola in itself doesn't offer much more aside from taking up space. You could probably eliminate the Palm Kernel altogether. I've used castor as high as 20% without any issues. Using more than 30% coconut will dry your skin unless you superfat like a demon.

Have you tried a very basic recipe of something like coconut, palm & olive oil? You might be pleasantly surprised.

I don't use Canola oil at all as it gives me DOS. I also don't use palm oil. Personal preference. I always superfat at least 7%.

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

AAAA!!! Help how do I send a PM??!!?!? Europa please don't go anywhere until I figure it out or you can please just PM me!

This is unreal !!

Thanks Oliva and Soapbuddy. Gonna try to simplify things and go down to only 3 or 4 oils.

Simply your recipe and add some Type of butter. Shea, Cocoa, Mango? You can also add some type of milk for creaminess. Good Luck! I never stick to the same recipe...that's so boring. I always tweek it one way or another by adding different additives.