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I make "Electrum" for our gaming group; a delicate gold (electrum is, traditionally, anything from white gold to green to pale yellow to medium yellow, and ranges from around 20% to 80% gold). Usually in simple rounds or ovals to simulate (really large!) coinage. It's such a unique word to...

Shh! My cheap bargain brand (we use the stuff by the gallon as fabric softener, glass de-sheeting, cleaners, and so on) works out to 4.7% if you call the company and beg. Once you find the company that makes your store brand. Which is a trial in and of itself. Although they do allow that the...

I CPOP almost every time and never detect a scent. Although, like Toxikon, I remove mine as soon as it reaches full gel phase, or after a few hours if I'm not paying attention. Your husband might just have an incredibly sensitive nose. Irish Lass also pointed out that she preheats her oven to...

So you use 0.0357 instead? No biggie, I trust your math more than mine, so I'll update my notes!

I think you just measure the number of grams of vinegar (household strength, not horticultural) that you use, and multiply by 0.0333. Then add that to your initial lye amount for your recipe. So if you use 100 g of vinegar, add 3.33 to the number of grams of lye you'll use.

The smell may be temporary, but the ugly is forever. :-) However, that's no bar (ha!) to using it at home.

Depends. The end bars might be OK, but...they also might smell really, really bad. Hold off, cut what you can, and analyze the end bars. You might be able to rescue them. The rest of it? Pitch.

That looks like a really, really severe goat milk burn--as in, it overheated severely. I've occasionally had that happen when using lots of oatmeal and honey in a recipe, too. Most will recommend that milk soaps go into the fridge or freezer for 24 hours to saponify slowly and at low...

Honestly, I think shampoo bars are a very individual thing. I did have some dry hair with a high-coconut bar (I was using the bath bar on my hair as well), but my skin reacted the same way. Changing over to high lard, high tallow, or high olive bars stopped that problem. I react well. My...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminate Aluminum likes to form aluminates in alkaline conditions. Certainly it's going to react badly with any remaining lye, but you'll also get sodium aluminate in any alkaline environment. I don't know the strength of the reaction at soap pH, but it...

Yep. My cousin likes very gentle, scentless soap, so I'm planning on a 50% olive oil soap in the next week or so for her. Then let it age a year... :mrgreen:

The lighting's not great here, but I tried a malachite soap today scented in lemon/lime. I'm also trying IrishLass' recommendation of gelling in a cooler oven than I usually do--about 110 or so--and I can't wait to see that work perfectly without giving me nasty pockmarks. This false traced as...

Curing will take longer at colder temperatures, but you'd have to test that and it's going to depend on the humidity in your attic as well. Ditto for summer, although hot, dry days should tend to speed up curing on average. Bar slump at 110° won't be an issue, it has to get hotter than that!

That's a lot of soft oils (70%, counting mango as hard), so it'll take forever to cure and have very slimy lather unless it's cured for...a year? More? Even my 2 year old high olive soaps are a bit slimy. That may be what you want, and if so, go for it! It's not that it'll be unusable at...

Thanks for that--I preheat to 170° and turn it off when I put the soap in. It works, but the soap often looks like the surface of the Moon. That's fine for home use, but I'd rather gifts didn't do that!

I'm Johnny-Late-To-The-Fair here, but I'll chime in. Get a stick blender. I did hand-mix once to experience soap making something like my great-great-grandmother would have. Once. It was so frustrating that I understand why great-great-grandmother bought her soap. What takes hour upon hour...

No, it doesn't. Too high, high, medium, low, and lowest-possible water level emulsions will all reach trace. Trace is a good way to determine you've reached emulsion. But it isn't even a completely reliable measure of that! You're making it sound like there's too much water until it...

That's a nice recipe, but as far as "hard," "bubbly," or "creamy," it's more "hard eventually," "not bubbly," and "creamy...if by creamy you mean a bit slimy." It's really easy on the skin, however, given the super fat and recipe! Consider: Soft Oils: Olive (44), RBO (10), Avocado (10)...

Dunn tells us that your super fatting oil won't stay that way anyway, it'll trade around salts with the soap oils. So sure, use castor if you like, but don't rely on it remaining as your super fat. Over time, it won't.

1) All else being equal. If you're trying to compare a water pocket, or a 25% concentration versus a 33% concentration, of course it'll differ. Gelling, with my typical 33% concentration, can make the difference between saponification in a few hours versus two days. 2) Ditto. 3) What...