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In soapcalc, change the way it calculates water from % of oil to lye concentration, it will be much easier to track your water discount. What that does is let you chose the concentration of the lye in the water rather than the amount of water vs oil. Much easier to keep it constant between...

Assuming you are making bath soap with only sodium hydroxide, yes, you can reduce lather with excess saturated fatty acids. The "ideal" soap has roughly equal amounts of saturated and unsaturated fatty acids. This shows up at some place in all soap calculators, in SoapCalc it's at the top of...

It will promote DOS badly, and can be toxic if it becomes chealated with something. DOS would be much more problematic as I don't expect you would be eating much of the soap.... I'd use micas.

Hot process soap can be very dry if you don't have enough water and much evaporates while you are cooking it. It will turn out fine, but will be hard to manage when finished. Packed crumbs and chunks. More water (38% is a good starting place) will give you soap fluid enough after the cook to...

The purpose of shaving soap is to lubricate the razor's edge so that it slips over the skin without abrading it while cutting off the hairs. Dense, fine bubbled lather helps keep the soap wet while shaving. The only other thing that counts is some superfat to keep the soap from drying the skin...

Yes, you must compensate for using citric acid, although the easy way is to use sodium citrate (a salt) rather than the free acid (citric acid). End result is the same, but you avoid the calculation. Can't recall the exact ratio at the moment, but it's in several postings here on SMF, do a...

Lol, if it is Drakkar or Fierce I probably could smell a drop in 5#, sadly. All the "new" Old Spice scents are so strong I can't stand to handle the sealed containers.... As far as lathering goes, if you are not shaving your whole face and hence cannot face lather, try lathering on one hand...

Four drops is perfect for me, I just want a hint of scent in my shaving soap. I think I have a fairly sensitive sense of smell, too, though. I find many commercial soaps to be grossly over-scented.

All the sugars in the beer speeds HP up quite a bit by producing significant extra heat. Your soap sounds quite normal to me for HP -- I use hot oils, hot lye, and get trace in a few minutes. I'm not making swirls or anything, just single color soap, so fast HP is fine by me. I can have the...

Get the scale, you won't regret it. The yellow color is fine, but I put the glycerine in later for that reason. I like nice white soap. I also use about four drops of FO in 200 grams of soap, but that's me. Hope it shaves nicely.

Indigo stains, but I've not yet tried to wash it back out. Probably minimally with single uses of a washcloth, but I re-use mine a few times, and there is definitely a bluish patch in the middle of my pale green washcloth at the moment. Just for fun, I'll drag yet another bar of soap into the...

Haha, I can only smell the oils in soap with no scent added. "soap" like Ivory smells like scented soap to me, not unscented. Sense of smell is highly variable, so someone else may still detect the original scent while you smell nothing at all, or worse, the fats in the soap and not the added...

My lemon scented shave soap faded away to nothing pretty fast, but when I use it I get a light lemon scent. Likely most people will smell a faint scent when they use the soap even though it has essentially no scent dry.

Some of the protein in the milk (and probably other things containing ammonia groups) get hydrolyzed by the lye, making free ammonia. It will evaporate from the soap during cure since it's quite volatile at high pH. It can be stinky for a while though.

Fragrance oils are by and large non-saponifiable and will have no effect on the superfat, since that by definition is un-saponified lipid. They may add some additional non-lipid oil which has the same effect, but an ounce per pound of something mostly NOT oil isn't going to hurt. As far as...

Anything that dark will stain washcloths badly, no matter what you are using. Unless the hotel is supplying navy blue wash cloths and towels, I'd stick with white soap with the logo, or at most a colored wrapper. Laundry expenses trying to get the blue blotches off the white cloth is going to...

Milk can contain up to about 12% fat by weight, so if you know the fat content it's worth calculating the weight in grams and adding that to your oils in the lye calculator using dairy fat as the oil type. Not all milks are that high, and if you are getting farm milk you may have to guess...

Do NOT add more water to the lye, it's likely to boil and spatter. Any other additives in the lye can also crystallize out when it cools (EDTA is know for this in high lye concentrations). Just use a bit more water next time and don't chill it.

How much water and how much lye? If you were close to 1:1, it's possible that the lye dissolved and then crystalized back out ('froze') when it cooled off.

Yup, probably zaps too. I get 7.2 oz of lye for a 5% superfat using Soapcalc. I forgot to correct for the fat in the goat milk. Did you run that recipe through a lye calculator, or did you get it from someone? That much lye will indeed make a very harsh soap, although it will mellow in six...