Teach Soap

OK - I use soap calc for the lye/water calculations, and I love playing with the recipes and watching the numbers change.
But this puzzles me: (Typical example)
I have a recipe with a certain set of numbers - easy to get them where I want, except for the bubbly/creamy numbers. That takes a bit of playing around.
So this recipe (in this example) has a creamy number of 34, and yet it feels creamier - by far - than another recipe with a creamy number of 41!

The recipe with 41 should be significantly creamier....right? But it isn't..by several tester's opinions - all consistent.
So what do I attribute that to? The specific ingredients? The creamy feel that I get from ingredient set #1 is different, better, despite lower numbers, than the creamy feel from set #2.

There was a discussion a short while ago, started by Karri, about how much of the expensive stuff you REALLY need - the lye takes what it wants, etc, and most of the high end ingredients are for label appeal) All that made complete sense to me...yet...how do you explain the above results?

Also - I am always running across reportedly "fabulously" creamy and bubbly recipes - on Soap Queen, for example - I run them through Soap Calc, and the numbers themselves are appallingly blah.... like = 21 for both bubbly and creamy... So does that mean that a 21 for that recipe feels better than a 31 for another recipe? Or is someones else's perception of creamy that vastly different from mine?
I always go for very high on bubbly and creamy - I figure - not that hard to achieve, so why not make those 2 desirable qualities as good as they can get?

sooooo..the point of all this is: (except for the actual lye calculation) - is Soap Calc full of you-know-what?

Do any or all of you find that the numbers do or do not correspond to your perceptions of those same qualities in the finished product?

Or is it just me?

Soap calc gives you general guidelines. Since everyone's skin is different it will react different on you. I played around with formulas that didn't look that great on soap calc, yet they made great soap. So I would take it with a grain of salt.

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

Maybe that is why you need to experiment and test and retest for awhile before someone sets up a buisness.
I do alot of lard soaps, but just recently tried the tallow (shortening from walmart) and I am thinking that I like the lard better but have not come to a final decision yet. On soap calc the numbers are a little better for the lard soap so maybe sometimes it works and sometimes not. Best advise is to keep very good notes, listen to your testers, continue to experiment and have some fun with it.

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

I know what you mean about resting and retesting, Susie, - these are just new formulas that I am experimenting with... my business only sells the "tried and true" ones that I have been using for several years.
I always used a regular lye calculator, so soap calc and it's numbers are a novelty that may or may not apply to reality

I agree and that is what I have heard from other soapers.

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

I love playing with soapcalc, but I think the way the soap feels has more to do with the superfat % than anything else.

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

HI Linda - I wish that explained the difference in my case - but all my superfat % were exactly the same in the recipes I am comparing...

still a bit of a mystery!

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

Here are my random contributions / ideas / theories for whatever they're worth ... because I think discussions like this can lead to some incredible insights!

I use SoapCalc all the time simply because it's what I got used to using and might as well stay consistent so I'm comparing apples to apples. I quite like it but I also know it has limitations. So I really get your frustration Kat ... I'm like you in that I want understand HOW and WHY soap acts like it does in the shower ....as per its formulation.

I tend to think that palm oil and olive oil screw with everything ...but in a good way . Here's why I think that:

Palm oil may be considered a "filler oil" by some soapers but I beg to differ. Maybe it doesn't impart major benefits to your skin when it's saponified all on its own, but in synergy with other fats it makes a world of difference to the feel, and it lends a true creaminess to soap. That said, if you used lots of palm oil but the rest of your formula/ingredients is blah ... well then I think it's just gonna be a blah soap, even though palm rates high-ish for creaminess. But a generous helping of palm with a strategic combo of oils/fats makes GREAT soap.

Olive oil is the other wild card to my mind. For e.g. SoapCalc makes castile look like a miserable failure, yet we know that's not true, especially if it's made with a steep water discount and left to cure for a long time. (Yes, opinions vary but generally speaking, castile is a pretty great soap and seems to be a staple in many a soaper's product line.) But where it gets weird is that OO makes your soap feel creamier yet only rates 17 for "creamy" in SoapCalc.

And for whatever it's worth, castor oil rates extremely high for creaminess but I think you need something "hard" to really "deliver" that experience in the water. Otherwise it's just kind of a mushy mess.

When I look at the SoapCalc numbers for the individual fats (first column) it takes some of the mystery out of it. I believe that all SoapCalc is doing is taking a weighted average of these numbers to give us the overall rating for each of hardness, cleansing, etc.

Though you can be sure someone somewhere is working on an algorithm to factor in how variables like water discount, temps, etc factor into the resulting qualities of the soap! It won't be perfect but I'm willing to bet soapers will flock to it. (Anything that reduces uncertainty -- even in testing -- reduces time to market and is going to be a success.)

I think that oils/fats behave differently based on how they're combined and "soaped" and SoapCalc doesn't really take those things into consideration. So OO isn't "creamy" per SoapCalc, yet if you add it to some other oils/fats it somehow does feel creamy in the shower (and I'd also bet that some testers are going to say that slime is "creamy" in their feedback, even though we soapers may not).

Then there's the fact that people interpret soap qualities so differently. I had a tester say my palm-free soap felt like lotion in the shower. She loved it. I personally thought it was blah. I've also had people say they loved some of my earlier soaps that had 50+% palm. So go figure right? So much is in the "skin of the beholder."

Karri

_________________
I soap therefore I am.

Wow, Karri, you took the 4 sentence paragraph I was going to post, and put it into a nicely rounded report

I agree. I like to look at the numbers, and play around a little, but I know that my Castile (as Karri mentioned) will be fabulous, and my Lard soaps, will be just lovely. My 100% CCN soap, sf at 20% looks just the same on Soapcalc as it does if I sf at 0%. At 20% it feels just devine! I love it, one of my faves, especially in the summers.... However, if I used this at a 0% SF, my skin would be peeling right off.... I honestly wouldn't put too many of my eggs into that basket.

The numbers don't change with the SF, so how can you get an accurate expectation???

The "numbers" on SoapCalc are definitely a tricky gaggle of geese. They're based purely on the fat compositions of the oils, and with that being the case, they can't take your superfat into account, or how much water you used, or other additives like milk (there's a listing for it, but I don't know that most of us use it) or honey or what those may do to your soap.

(As an aside -- "Creamy" in SoapCalc does refer to the lather, not the feel of the soap itself! Bubbly and creamy are both lather properties. I think this is part of the problem we can have resolving disparate tester/customer comments, too -- differences of terminology ;D)

Just to add another "wait, what?" to the pile: while higher INS and lower iodine are supposed to indicate a harder bar of soap, I've had recipes I've tinkered with where the numbers made little sense:

Recipe v1: lower hardness, lower iodine, higher INS
Recipe v2: higher hardness, higher iodine, lower INS

Makes me sort of curious which is actually harder, but since the difference between the two would probably be minimal, it'd be hard to test, I think. XD Maybe if you took both versions to extremes...

As far as the soap qualities go, though, I'm starting to find that it's more useful to be familiar with what each oil brings to your soap, and then maybe use the quality numbers to try to balance them a little.

_________________
CP newbie who's turning into a soaping addict!

_________________
I soap therefore I am.