Teach Soap

Hi ! My first time posting. I'm too new to have made anything yet. It's embarrassing - I'm getting confounded by the most basic thing in a formula - Water !

I "get" saponification and SAP values - nice, precise, scientific.

BUT- so far, in looking around, I see the water/lye solution as anywhere from 25% to 38%. Considering how exact everything else is, that's a lot of wiggle room !

Is it true water molecules play no part in saponification ? My understanding is water is like a dating service...ensuring lye molecules meet fatty acid molecules.

So - as long as the lye is completely dissolved AND mixed well with the oils - why is so much water needed ? Couldn't it be like a 1 to 1 ratio of lye to water ?

Can anyone point me to "The Rules" for water somewhere ? Everything I've found is about the oils and other goodies and online lye calc.

You have a nice Forum here - credit to all participants !

Welcome!
Some fragrances tend to accelerate trace. I find using full water in a recipe that has a troublesome fragrance gives me more working time.

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

Thank you soapbuddy ! That is useful to know, and I have put that in my notebook.

I think I am newer to this than you realise. I am too new to be concerned with the intricacies of fragrance-ing just yet.
I just want to wrap my head around the whole water quantity thing.

This forum, more than anywhere so far, has given my "Oh, this should be easy." attitude a wake-up call...I see there is art and science to this craft !

logic would also say that the less water you use the less drying\curing time there would be? But I do not discount too much as there are difficulites I encounter in the chemical process - like without the dating service the two dates would get to home base too quickly!

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Susie
Sometimes A Mistake is so much fun, You just have to do it again!

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

Oh my gosh!!!! I second what soapbuddy says about troublesome fragrance and water. She gave me this suggestion and since I have been adding the maximum water with my "bad boys" like Relaxing from BB I have had very few accelerated traces.

Hmmmm...so not only can some fragrances accelerate the reaction, ( the wisdom of experience should never be discounted ! ), but, I am taking away from this that beyond ( below ) the minimum amount of water derived from a calc, then it isn't possible to super-saturate the water with lye.

In other words, water will only dissolve into solution so much lye and that's that.
I will do more lye learning.

@Bubbles2 - so saponification is as much about the anticipation as dating ?! and yes, logic suggested that to me but again, as with relationships, logic isn't necessarily where the magic is.

What an interesting thing D.I.Y. soaping is. I had thought I might one day make all my household soaps...laundry, dish, body, shaving cream. Not to sell or make creative art, just to have control over what's in them. If it saved money too that would be good.

Some time ago someone wrote: I fell in love with the planning and designing, then the actual soap making, then the cutting, then the curing, then the label making, then the wrapping, then the using.
And that is what soaping making is all about. The only thing I have to add to her comments, is I also love the giving! So welcome to what they call the "addiction" of soap making.

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Susie
Sometimes A Mistake is so much fun, You just have to do it again!

Thank you, Bubbles2.
I hadn't thought I'd get this interested @ the basic research stage !
All from accidentally finding a "natural" D.I.Y. shaving cream recipe.
( It didn't work. At all. Stupid untested internet recipes ! )
This Forum is a great place to search for info, & very tolerant of newbies it seems.
Even pre-noobs, like me.

The first soap I made was way tooo complicated. Then with the advise from this forum I went to BB's site and got the basic beginner recipe, cut it down, ran it thru the soap calc and I was off and running. My mom who gets a bar of every soap I make, finally used some of this soap late fall and when I washed my hands at her house one day I was suprised to discover it got better with time (thats my opinion of course).

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Susie
Sometimes A Mistake is so much fun, You just have to do it again!