Teach Soap

I'm a newbie, pouring my first batch of basic recipe this morning.
I think the most confusing thing I have read about is the lye calculator and How you decide what bases and percentages to use.
Do you just say, I want a mild moisturizing soap and use the oils and bases that meet that? If anyone has time, please explain how you decide what to make and how much of each ingredient.

I used soapcalc.net for all of my calculations until I purchased the soapmaker program. When I first started making up my own recipes I used the oils I had on hand (olive, coconut, lard and castor) I wanted olive to be at least 40% because of its qualities, I read that castor over 5% could make a bar soft and coconut over 25% could dry out skin so I stayed under those percentages. Basically, I adjusted my percentages so that my final recipe would be about in the middle of each range (hardness, cleansing, etc) to start and then did some tweaking to get the conditioning number into the higher range. You need to remember that the numbers are just guidelines. If you plug in 100% olive oil, the numbers look awful, but it's a great bar of soap. The same thing goes for superfatting. 5-8% is a good range for most people.

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

So you really just play with recipes. Thanks for the response!

If you get the soapmaker software, it will give you a graph on how well the soap might come out. http://www.soapmaker.ca/

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

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