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18 weeks! Wow, so not ready for that!!! But here’s a picture of my bunnies to celebrate the fact of not being ready…..

I use a 40% lye concentration and have a 50% hard oils recipe. It’s such a low amount of stearic acid you will perhaps not even notice a difference. I did several trials using varying amounts and at 1% it was barely noticeable for me. May I ask why you wish to include stearic? The reason I ask...

Hey, I’ve played around with Stearic Acid quite a bit since March and found that actually I can go fairly low with the temp without it causing too much of an issue. My happy soaping temp is 40 degrees C which is about 104F and I don’t get stearic spots, or too much acceleration since I’ve got...

I used 38% lye concentration which is my normal amount, actually it’s 40% normally but I dropped it a little to give myself a bit more playtime to see how the oatmeal was in the batter…… I went through my shelves and found a batch I made with collodial oatmeal the week before (totally forgot...

It sounds like you have a mystery to solve here too! I’m still uncertain of what could have caused my soap to swell in the mould and get stuck, I’ve never had this happen before but the only difference here was that I’d added oatmeal and didn’t put in my heating pad. I forgot to mention but I...

Ah I see. Thank you for that. I actually battled with it enough this morning and got the silicone liner and loaf out of the wooden mould and it came out of the silicone fine but its just so weird how it swelled like that. It absolutely must have been the oatmeal...... if i ever happens again...

Hi Isg, will try this......although why do you think this would help? Or do you mean, if it ever gets stuck in the mould again?

Just wondering if anyone has experienced something similar and why it might have happened..... Made a test batch yesterday as wanted to add oatmeal so in 500g batch I added 1tbsp oatmeal. Stirred and SB into oils before adding lye. I then made my soap as usual, soaping at around 40 degrees...

Thanks DeeAnna. That makes perfect sense. I’ll give ZNSC a go at some point (it’s on THE list!) but I really am enjoying my current recipe & finally have no squishy bottom thanks to your advice and @KiwiMoose’s introduction to Soy wax 😂

Thank you for the links and for your view on how it behaves in the lip balm. I’m going to give it a go, combined with some other of my waxes and see how it feels….

Whoops! Thanks for the heads up!!!

Hi Zany, I know this post was a few years ago but I’m just wondering if you use other waxes in your lip balms too as at minute I’m experimenting with rice bran wax and sunflower wax (attempting to find a vegan version which feels as nice as beeswax) but also including stearic acid and in some...

A while has passed since I last posted on this thread but I’ve been busy in the studio working on my soaps!! I spent some time experimenting with stearic acid and then realised I was using way too much for CP but actually coped with the batters considering…. Anyway, the result is some lovely...

Just out of interest: I understand how hard Castile soaps can get after a nice long cure but will that hardness ever help the bar to resist water uptake & becoming mushy and bendy? I’ve just found some soaps I made a few years ago which had 50% OO and whilst they’re really very hard they still...

Thank you. I must admit, maths isn’t my strong point but I honestly don’t know what happened to my brain on this one 😂😂

oh dear, now I feel like i'm losing my marbles...... I have got myself very confused with this.... I think perhaps I've been adding too much...... no wonder it's making a big difference to my soaps!! I've made batches with 2% (10g), 3% (15g), 5% (25g)......... So when it says 0.5-1% total use...

My apologies, it’s 1% of total Oils that I’ve used up to…… I’m making 500g test batches so it’s 5g….. I like to soap around 40 too as I use a high % of butters and this seems a sweet spot but recently I really liked the addition of stearic to up my numbers and it seemed to make quite a...

I’d love to know what temperature people soap at when Stearic acid in CP soap. I have made several batches now using Stearic in varying amounts up to 1% of total oils and with lye & oils combined the temp is usually around 55 degrees celsius (recommended 60 degrees somewhere but now can’t find...

Thanks Zing, It’s really useful to hear opinions on this so I’m just going to get into the studio and make some & see how they turn out. I’ll report back in a few months time!!

Hi Zing, I’m just playing around with my base recipe in an attempt to increase longevity of my bars and have found on the calc that subbing some of my olive oil for RBO helps to hire the palmitic which is nice as I can also get RBO fairly reasonably priced here but just curious as to how it...