Teach Soap

Has anyone noticed a significant amount of water loss from evaporation in their lotions (due to heating and holding the phases for 20min)?
Our 340g recipe of lotion only resulted in 270g of lotion!?!
Some loss from transfer to different bowls maybe, but not 70g!
Can all this be from evaporation?

Do you all do anything special to account for this. We had 77% in the water phase and the lotion is just so thick, I am guessing it would have to be from evaporation and maybe we really made a lotion (after evap) with a 60% water phase.

I heat more then I need, then weight the amount needed. Yes, there is always some evaporation. Is your scale accurate? Is the heating done on a very low barely simmer?

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

The double boiler water is at a rolling boil but the water for the lotion is not, it might have a few bubbles at the bottom. There is alot of steam but I figured it was from the double boiler water.
We finally have a good scale, got one that is 100g by .01g and have one that is a few hundred g by 1g. The 100g weight is accurate on both.
But based on the water suggestion of 60-80% for most lotions, our lotion with "77%" is so thick you can hardly get it out of the bottle, I doubt it is really 77% water when we are making it (the thickeners are like 5% ewax and 2.4% stearic, nothing too crazy)

Actually, 5% ewax and 2.4% stearic is quite a bit. I would back off on the stearic. E-wax is a complete emulsifier and doesn't really need any stearic. Try a small batch without it and see how you like it.

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

77% water . . . is 23% ingredients, but since I don't know the formula I can't guess how much of that is lipids.
My face cream is 13% lipids, and only 6% of those are solid at room temp.

I use an Erlanger flask to heat and hold my water. It has a rubber stopper and evaporation is kept to a minimum.

But I also have additional water kept heated in a separate container. I weigh my water before I mix and then I top off as needed.

Hope this helps!