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I find it incredibly drying even with high super fat, so I might personally be a little sensitive to coconut. However, I'm fine with it in a standard recipe at 10-20%. Regardless, you can certainly add scent if you want to! As Cellador noted, some might be sensitive to it, but some people...

The above covers the basics. I also find dragon's blood to be strongly earthy and spicy. Bay rum has earthy notes under the strong spice.

I decorated Thanksgiving weekend, I cigar-banded the last of the gift soap yesterday when it hit week four (with some exceptions, but not that many). Now it's time to bag it, tag it, and stick it under the tree. And get this season over with. I can't be the only one who dislikes it. :-)

Even a near-100% tallow or 100% tallow soap is a great soap; I find tallow to be a well-balanced oil in and of itself! But anything up to thirty percent rapeseed certainly is also going to be a very nice soap--with higher conditioning than tallow alone! As DeeAnna noted, sugar or honey at 1...

Note: You'll need to recalculate your recipe via SoapCalc or whatever lye calculator you use. If you're not adverse to animal oils, both lard and tallow are close to palm in terms of what they bring to the bar (there are differences, of course). If you don't want to do that, you might be OK...

Mine are all in a cabinet over the refrigerator. The coconut is solid during winter, slushy during summer, so the temperature never seems to reach 76°. I wouldn't store a more unstable oil there--I'd use the refrigerator--but for most of the standard ones, it's fine.

You may find (I do find) that the top notes tend to disappear in soap after a while. Citrus notes? I have very little luck with them having any staying power. Bergamot will hang a while, but even that fades faster than the mid and base notes. So I'd personally play with it, but count on the...

With that fatty acid profile, I'd assume it goes bad fast and has a short shelf life. That having been said, there's no reason you can't use it at 10% in a CP soap--many people do use short-life oils with great success as long as the total amount is low and the rest of the soap has little to no...

Or just keep it simple; 100% lard, or tallow, or palm. They're entirely capable of carrying a bar of soap all on their own, I've found (although my clear favorite is tallow in that sense). Add a teaspoon of honey per pound of oils to boost the lather a bit, maybe substitute some of the oil for...

This. Although depending on the swirl and the chunkiness I want, I can pour from anything from emulsion to medium trace. Speeding the saponification with heat seems to suppress out soda ash, although some bars did get a bit of it. Just spraying with alcohol every twenty minutes or so...

An oil that also doesn't have a heavy cleansing but will pull the bar together faster would help. If you don't object to animal fats, lard is perfect--it's very conditioning in and of itself. If you'd rather not use animal oils, palm will do. I personally find it a bit harsher than lard, but...

Hey, you like what you like. I personally prefer the silicon and dislike the lined molds, but that's me. It's great that you prefer the lined molds.

Same. I took some inspiration from Kandinsky's Bauhaus period, which overlaps the twenties, particularly Several Circles, used less frenetic colors, and tried to capture the feeling with a freehand poured circular soap with not quite concentric rings in deeper hues. It really didn't work out...

What she said, which is way more succinct than the blathering on I did above it. :shark::bunny:

That sounds good, actually! Keep the palm high for some hardness, keep the coconut and/or pko high for more hardness (but also high lather and heavy cleansing). Honestly, even pure olive cures rock hard (as in, could pound nails with it) in six to twelve months. And you can use either coconut...

1) Sure! I make a gift batch of stain sticks (heavy on the coconut and tallow) every year. In a pinch, you can (and we all have) grated it right into the washing machine. The washing soda is there as a water softener and to raise the pH of the water so the soap can work better, but if your...

I had to pound on it until it broke away a bit, then cut off the bottom, then push it out of the cylinder. Since the mold was free, no big deal.

Well, last night, actually. I'd thoroughly cleaned out an old lye bottle from Essential Depot and used it as a vertical circular mold. The central soap shouldn't be quite so bulls-eye as this is. Now I just have to figure out how to get the soap out of it. Yeah, didn't think about that...

Guinness lists it as, "The longest known palindromic word is saippuakivikauppias (19 letters), which is Finnish for a dealer in lye (caustic soda)." Since the gent in question speaks Finnish, I'm gonna figure he and Guinness are right and Wikipedia is not entirely correct, or using an...

A very linguistic friend of mine just pointed out that the longest single-word palindrome (word that's spelled the same forward and backward) in any language is the Finnish word: SAIPPUAKIVIKAUPPIAS According to Guinness, anyway. This word means "one who works with lye," according to him...