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The refined versions are more consistent. They are low in moisture and free fatty acids that would promote rancidity and shorten the shelf life. The unrefined versions are more variable products. The quality and stability can vary according to where they come from and how they were extracted...

The likeliest source of contamination is going to remain your water unless you switch to distilled or demineralized. Not every bottle is necessarily the same. Are you getting DOS with and without the shea butter? Is it refined or unrefined?

There are caveats to buying steel items to be used with caustics, but your method does a poor job of solving those issues, so you should include additional facts with your recommendations so that people can decide the best thing to do. A magnet will not stick to austenitic steel like the...

That article is pretty technical with the physics, but the bottom line is that some types of stainless steel aren't magnetic, and that includes some of the more corrosion-resistant types. A magnet won't stick to the 300-series steels, which are used for a lot of things, including many (not...

From time to time I make transparent soap. The trick to that is to add ingredients, essentially solvents, that make the soap crystals very, very small. That allows light to penetrate the soap. I do that, of course, on purpose. Sometimes I've done CP soap that is more translucent than usual, but...

This is understandably what people feel, and it's frequently repeated, but it's not based on fact. They take whole palm oil and fractionate it to derive that liquid olein that's used as cooking oil. In that initial fractionation, they separate the liquid from the solid more efficiently than you...

On the matter or solid or liquid, the "average" palm oil I buy is solid in the winter and semi-liquid in the summer. That's unless I get the 50 lb cubes, which must be something other that just well-stirred palm oil because it stays solid in the summer. There are various ways that palm oil...

It will get significantly hotter, by some tens of degrees depending on how much vinegar is substituted for water. However, the boiling point of lye goes up dramatically with increasing concentration. It appears there's not a realistic danger of the solution boiling. The boiling point of a 33%...

I suggest the recommended usage rate for orange 5x in CP soap should be zero. I shudder to think how many dollars have been wasted on that, though I understand folks need to try it for themselves. It's not going to produce a strong, true orange fragrance in CP, and it will fade away. A Susie...

SL is a preservative, but I have no opinion about how it could be used as such in LS, B&B or cosmetics, or whether it could be used. That is not its normal application, and there are more appropriate and proven products. Some people believe that a preservative should generally be added to...

I wouldn't know where to start. Google "sodium lactate preservative" and you'll find a ton of info. The usual context is food. Exactly what it does in LS I don't know, but I don't imagine it will do any harm.

I think it's a good idea to finish diluting at least part of it. SL is a humectant, so maybe you'll like the result. Please let us know. You actually did something accidentally that I was going to try on purpose. :) Also sodium lactate IS a preservative, so you don't need one just because of...

The Lush solid soaps are made from a soap base equivalent to M&P, combined with fragrance, color and such. They may not be remeltable, especially since propylene glycol seems to have been cut out, but it's quite the same sort of thing. As such, they are fun and nicely done products. I remember...

I have tried this and personally noticed no improvement in the soap with either jojoba or cetyl alcohol. Will be interested to hear about your results.

It would definitely be a slightly lower pH and theoretically could be better than the superfatting we normally do, but there are some problems with doing that in home soapmaking -- and one in particular that I ran into. Experiments have gone on hold for the past few weeks, which is why I...

Generally you don't need to worry about pH when making soap. Most people will get more mileage out of focusing on recipe formulation and good technique. It appears to be well established that the pH of a skin cleansing product has an affect on how irritating that product can be. Lower pH is...

I like Joy's info better than WSP's. Suppliers just tend to skew optimistic, sometimes extremely. Most of the ones listed by WSP as "strong scent" simply are not. But there are several that can be strong in CP, including lavender, ylang ylang and rose geranium. It takes experimentation to see...

Yes, that is a huge improvement. As you suspected, those are not chemical splash goggles. Splash goggles are either non-vented designs or indirectly vented (the vents are covered so there is no direct path for chemicals to splash into your eyes). I am not suggesting you can't use these for...

I am saying that Castile is made that way, which we can't easily replicate. So even if you use 100% olive oil, there's still an argument that it's not very authentic. When people say that adding any other oil besides OO results in a *******ized version of Castile, they overlook that. If you...

I didn't get exactly the setup you suggest -- maybe it's something that works -- but keep in mind that the hydroxides we use attract moisture from silica packets, not the other way around.