Search results

Be careful, soap scents can lead you down a rabbit hole in which you can wander around forever...... Cool water is nice, I like sandalwood, Egyptian Dragon is good, but I'm not fond of Dragon's Blood, smells like a head shop and brings back unpleasant memories from High School.

My HP always separates, just stir it back together. What you are seeing is the quickly saponifying oils becoming soap and dissolving in the water while the slow oils don't or vise versa. Looks like wet applesauce with some liquid around the edges? If so it's perfectly normal and it will...

I wonder if there is a batch issue -- reviews did say, though, that the new formulation faded badly. Something to be aware of anyway.

Another quick update: started using the bar made with Sensuous Sandalwood the other day. Still has a sandalwood scent with something "perfumy" in it, not quite as "baby powder" as it had initially, but it's still there. Not unpleasant, but I prefer Bulk Apothacary's sandalwood, it's a bit...

Red palm oil at 5% looks exactly like cheddar cheese. For a bright orange you will need a bit more red of some sort I think. I got teased when I gave away some 5% palm soap, because it looked very very much like a piece of cheese from the grocery (also dyed with beta carotene, by the way)...

I wouldn't buy the book, all the information is readily available here and on YouTube. I've tried her method from the video, and here's my take on the whole thing! Unless you add sugar or some other "heating" substance, you won't get the fast, fluid process, I think the added heating from the...

I'm a very new soaper, but here's my take on OO: the best soaps are "balanced" in terms of fatty acid content. You want enough of the long chain saturated fatty acids (stearic and palmitic mostly) to make a hard bar and enough of the unsaturated oleic/linoleic oils to keep the soap from being...

I have found that the only thing that really counts in shaving soap is slickness. Lather must be "wet" enough to be very slippery or you get a shave much like using water (which I did for 35 years or so, shaving my face in the shower without soap). You only need enough "foam" to keep the...

Scent is sort of an overwhelming subject when you start soaping, for sure. Are you making this for a specific person or persons? If so, find out what they like in commercial soaps and aftershaves, etc. and try a few "duplicate" scents. Or you can get some samplers of scents -- I got the...

Sense of smell varies enormously, obviously. For me, Drakkar is overpowering, but others enjoy it, so we must not smell the components the same way. Important to remember this if you want to sell soap, just like making beer for a brew-pub: You are making things for your customers, not you...

Lol, Drakkar is definitely a love it or hate it cologne. At very low levels, it's OK, as in I would happily use it if someone gave me some, but at "standard" strength it's way too much for me. And the mauve discoloration has to be dealt with too as some people won't want pink "masculine" soap...

I have been using the sample bar of "Shave and a Haircut" the last few days. Very nice slightly herbal scent, might be some lemon verbena in there. Warm, if you know what I mean, very pleasant. Still pretty light as far as scents go, but persists on my skin for quite a while. A good scent...

With that much stearic acid you will get much better results by using hot process, as the stearic acid saponifies on contact with lye. I use 60/40 KOH/NaOH, and will eventually try 70% KOH -- the soap will lather much more easily with higher KOH content. 10% is likely to give you trouble with...

Full water, hot process. Soap was softer than my usual HP soaps when I cut it, and stayed softer for a month or two. Quite hard now, very nice soap. I would not CP 20% soy wax for fear it would "wax out" before gel stage.

I don't think the soy wax is contributing much to overheating, it's pretty slow to react. CO, on the other hand, reacts quickly and a high percentage could lead to heating soap. My mother has dry skin, so I don't use much CO -- 10% or so, and only 10% in shaving soap. Have not tried CP with...

Soy wax is a problem for CP if you use large amounts as it tends to "wax out" if the temperature drops. It melts around 140F, I think (or higher, don't remember), and in large amounts is a pain. I HP soy wax soap -- made a nice one with 40% canola, 40$ soy oil, and 20% soy wax to use up some...

Don't take the numbers on the soap calculators for things like hardness and cleansing as some sort of gospel, they are really only percentages of the fatty acids in the soap. "Cleansing" numbers are usually the percentage of myristic and the other "odd" fatty acid in coconut oil. These tend to...

All of the solid (as in not croap) soaps I've tried were waxy pucks that look like they were sliced off an extruded roll. That is how I would make it if I were making shaving soap in commercial quantities. They are all soft enough to mold with hand pressure -- the hardest one is Derby shaving...

I have not found anything about castor oil that would incline me to include it in shaving soap. I have not tried to replace coconut oil with castor yet, although that's a possibility someday when I use up the two decade supply of soap I already have. Initially the high castor soap I made had...

Here's an interesting recipe to try: 40% soy oil 40% canola oil 20% soy wax (148 I think, fully hydrogenated, no additives). I made this to use some old frying oil that had donuts fried in it, several years ago. Came out yellowish and soft, gradually firmed up and is now quite hard. I...