Palmitoleic acid (16:1) - Does it bring anything to a soap's behavior?

I searched on Google and here on SMF about the palmitoleic acid and what can give to a soap when (and if) it turns to a sodium salt but with no luck. Here on SMF I only found that the egg yolk has some amount of this acid.

After some soaper's opinion here about avocado oil in my experiment that can understand "moisturizing" property of this oil in a soap, also another friend of mine did notice this property. Well to my skin I didn't notice any real difference from the above experiment so I think it is for the skin type that can react different in various combinations of sodium salts of fatty acids. Many sites says that avocado has high amount of unsaponifiables so I guess it would be the reason.

I then asked for the analysis certificate of the avocado oil I used in my experiment from the shop I got it and this is all it says:

Refined avocado oil.
Unsaponifiable content: 0.5%
Palmitic acid: 19.6%
Stearic acid: 0.8%
Palmitoleic acid at 9,3%.

Oleic acid: 55.1%
Linoleic acid: 13.8%
Linolenic acid: 0.7%

Also other people have seen this difference in avocado along with macadamia oil as Soapmaker145 says:

Soapmaker145 said:

... I can detect a different feel for soaps that have avocado/macademia nut oils and canola...

Click to expand...

I then asked the shop I buy the oils from to also send me the certification analysis of macadamia nut oil and guess what. It also has an amount of 19% of palmitoleic acid! It didn't have any info on the unsaponifiable matter amount, but searching in Google I found from a foreign vendor that macadamia nut oil has around 1,5% of unsaponified matter.

So I guess this might be for this not well known fatty acid (palmitoleic) but does anyone have any more information / reference for this one?

When I worked at a food testing lab, we used to to the fatty acid profile of different fats. I remember 16:1 being common in some fats.

Since its a fatty acid, it would be saponifiable. It would give the sodium salt of the palmitoleic acid. I would guess that the properties would be somewhere in between palmatic acid (hardening) and oleic acid (conditioning) in soap.

Accoriding to a little paper I just read, at least in humans, palmitoleic acid behaves as a saturated fat. However, it is classified as an unsaturated fat due to the double bond in it (like in oleic acid). Very interesting.


There are so many different fatty acids in things. We tested for over 20 of them. One of the sources that we tested most often was chia seeds. They were full of the uncommon fatty acids and the omega 3's. I remember them having some very long ones in there too (like 24:0 or something like that).
Here is an interesting list of the unsaturated fatty acids.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsaturated_fatty_acids

ngian said:

I searched on Google and here on SMF about the palmitoleic acid and what can give to a soap when (and if) it turns to a sodium salt but with no luck. Here on SMF I only found that the egg yolk has some amount of this acid.

So I guess this might be for this not well known fatty acid (palmitoleic) but does anyone have any more information / reference for this one?

Click to expand...

It's an interesting question. I have not seen any information on sodium palmitoleate soap. It would probably not be of any interest on an industrial level, so there may truly be nothing out there on the subject. For my part, the oils I use have so little palmitoleic that I don't take account of it at all.

I have tried some odd fatty acids as in meadowfoam oil, wax esters as in jojoba, and fatty alcohols. No magic ingredient yet. It's possible a few people have identified positive properties of the palmitoleic in avocado and macadamia nut oils, but who knows.

Palmitoleic is of interest these days for nutritional purposes, but supplement capsules are not such an economical source. I don't know how to get it in bulk form. If it was possible to get the free fatty acid, it could be tried in HP soap. Some sort of high-palmitoleic triglyceride could be tried in CP or HP.