additives in liquid soap

[monique]

Hello! I just made my first batch of liquid soap and it came out fine...not a sudsy as I'd like but I believe that has something to do with the salt. I have a few questions and really hope someone can help with answers. First, how could I make my soap produce more bubbles? I was also wondering at what stage can I add to my recipe with extracts, or other additves? Lastly, has anyone used raw goats milk in their recipe and if so was it used in place of the water mixed with the lye? Is the shelf life different with the milk?
Thank you in advance to anyone who can help rest my head

 

[The Efficacious Gentleman]

Can you post your full recipe and the reason why you went with that one? That way people can avoid suggesting certain solution if it is actually not going to work for you/was something you want to avoid.

 

[Susie]

^ That. We need your recipe (in weights, please) to be able to troubleshoot your recipe.

General information, however, is this:

You can add bubbles by adding sugar at 1 tsp-1 tblspn PPO (per pound of oil). You can also increase the coconut oil. And add castor oil to stabilize what lather it makes.

It depends on which additives you want to add as to when you add them.

GM needs to be the liquid mixed with the lye. You should only use glycerin or water for dilution. That should not affect the shelf life. It will, however, affect the clarity.

 

[monique]

my recipe is olive oil and castor oil. 20 ounces olive and 4 castor. I love olive oil soap and figured the castor would help lather. I then added the mixture of distilled water with iodized salt with a dropper to until the consistency was right. I wish there was more lather and I'd like to add some extracts and glycerin but not sure when I can add them. Hope this helps

 

[IrishLass]

While castor is great for lending a certain amount of 'enhancing body' to already existing lather produced by other oils, I've found that olive oil on it's own doesn't produce enough of the right kind of lather to be a good showcase for castor. I personally would have used some coconut along with the castor.

Speaking of olive, coconut and castor, have you seen this thread?: http://www.soapmakingforum.com/showthread.php?t=46114 It mainly revolves around a wonderful glycerin liquid soap formula made up of 65% olive, 25% coconut and 10% castor, which makes a wonderful liquid soap with lovely lather.

Edited to add: salt, while being able to thicken liquid soap (at least to a point), unfortunately has the detrimental side-effect of being a lather killer.


IrishLass

 

[monique]

thank you

I will take a look at that thread, thanks. May I ask what else I could use to thicken and how to do it?

 

[DeeAnna]

You haven't really said anything about your recipe other than it contains 20 oz olive and 4 oz castor. That's a little help, but it's not the whole story.

First of all, what are your expectations for this soap? Bathing, hair, hand washing, dishes, ???

Why did you start diluting with a salt solution rather than just plain water? What method did you follow for diluting the soap?

What dilution ratio did you finally end up with (water to soap ratio)? You say in one post that you diluted until the "consistency was right" but in your last post you want to know how to thicken it. So ... what kind of thickness does the soap have?

Why do you want to add more glycerin? It's been my experience that glycerin is a lather killer if added during dilution.

 

[monique]

My apologies for being so brief...I am so new at this and I only got the recipe and directions from an internet blog. It seemed easy for me to try since I am new at this. I figured I would move on as I learned...but I have too many questions and don't really have the $$ to be wasting.This is exactly what brought me to this forum.Thank you for asking me questions to help answer my own. Besides the two oils I only made a lye solution. So, distilled water, potassium hydroxide, olive and castor oil. My understanding was to get this to trace and keep it at 160 degrees throughout the cook process which took over 6 hrs.After cook, it was a 5 to 1 dilution (water to paste) which I did. I found it to be too watery. The suggestion was iodized salt added to distilled water and use a dropper and put that in the soap mix, stir, and keep adding till consistency is right.That is what I did.My expectations were a nice moisturizing hand soap.What I got was a nice soap that does make my hands feel clean even though the lather isn't great but find I need lotion afterwards because its drying. I thought glycerin or perhaps an aloe extract would aid in the moisturizing. I would like to get the hand soap down pat before trying to do a shower gel. I apologize for the confusion. I just have 6 cups of paste and I have no idea if I can save this by making it more moisturizing and perhaps get it to provide a lather. Thank you

also, If there is something I can add to what already has been diluted and thickened with this salt water, that would be helpful. My main concern is not having to throw away all the paste I have and I want to learn from this.

 

[The Efficacious Gentleman]

Not wanting to seem annoying, but please do post your full recipe with amounts - for example we have no idea about the amount of superfat is in the recipe at the moment and a question would be: are your expectations about liquid soap realistic or is there something in your recipe (for example a 0% SF) which would jump out at us. Putting out all of the ingredients, with amounts and total process allows us to really clear up some obvious things right away. If someone says "I used some CO in a bar and it dries my skin" one would assume they used too much CO and/or not enough SF, but the recipe might be perfectly fine and the issue lies with what the poster themselves considers to be drying and so on. Recipes might be a pain to type out sometimes, but they are absolutely key to trouble-shooting. Often you will see someone stubbornly refuse to post the recipe for whatever reason, and then people just give up on trying to help them as we have little information to go on.

A 5:1 wateraste mix would be very thin. Try a 1:1 for starters and see how that works out.

One very good tip for avoiding wasting money - ask on here before you make something (I know you found us after making the paste, but it's a general tip for the future) because people can highlight things that would result in a waste before you actually make it. I rarely did anything without checking it on here (in old posts or making a new one) and it has really saved me a lot of trial and error!

 

[DeeAnna]

Chances are pretty good that you waaaaaay over-diluted the soap at a 5:1 water-to-paste ratio. An olive oil soap contains a high % of oleic acid and it should be nicely honey-thick over a fairly wide range of dilution. That means it should be pretty easy to dilute to a nice consistency. Since your dilution is watery, it's likely that you overshot the optimum dilution range.

Best solution if you're determined to salvage the diluted soap is to evaporate some of the water by gentle heating. Or if your house has low humidity, you can try pouring the diluted soap into a shallow wide pan and let some of the water evaporate naturally over several days.

Salt can only do so much to thicken a liquid soap. You want the soap to be at an optimum dilution FIRST and then add salt to thicken. You overshot the dilution if I'm following you correctly, and no amount of salt is going to fix that. Bear in mind too that soap with a high % of oleic acid can be thickened somewhat with salt, but once your oleic acid % drops, salt doesn't always work well.

An olive soap just won't lather well -- whether liquid soap or bar soap. If you've ever tried a castile bar soap, the lather is pretty much what you should expect from a castile liquid soap. Adding castor will enhance lather, but castor won't create lather if the rest of the soap doesn't lather well.

At a 5:1 dilution, your liquid soap contains about 17% soap paste and very roughly 10% actual pure soap (just the lye + fat weight). That is the other reason why the diluted soap may not be lathering well -- you've diluted it to the point there's not much soap in your hands to build a lather from. Try washing your hands with a dab of the undiluted soap paste and see if the lathering is somewhat better when you've got more soap to wash with.

If you eventually want a soap with a "shower gel" consistency, you probably should be thinking about adding extra ingredients to actually create a gel. Liquid soap of the type you've made can be nicely honey thick if diluted carefully, but it's never going to be a gel consistency without additives. Soap gels can be made by using sodium carbonate (washing soda) and thickeners such as HEC (a modified cellulose) and xanthan gum. I've not done anything like this, but others may be able to offer advice.

Last but not least, there's no reason to cook a liquid soap for 6 hours. I know that's what a lot of people do, but there's no point to all that effort. If there was a real point, we would also have to make bar (NaOH) soap only with a long hot process cook. Obviously a lot of people don't cook their bar soap recipes for hours, and the same goes for liquid soap. I recommend these tutorials by Susie and Irish Lass:

No-neutralization Liquid Soap Tutorials:
Irish Lass: http://www.soapmakingforum.com/showthread.php?p=428988 see posts 8 and 9
and: http://www.soapmakingforum.com/showthread.php?t=57974
Susie: http://www.soapmakingforum.com/showthread.php?t=49852

 

[cmzaha]

My apologies for being so brief...I am so new at this and I only got the recipe and directions from an internet blog. It seemed easy for me to try since I am new at this. I figured I would move on as I learned...but I have too many questions and don't really have the $$ to be wasting.This is exactly what brought me to this forum.Thank you for asking me questions to help answer my own. Besides the two oils I only made a lye solution. So, distilled water, potassium hydroxide, olive and castor oil. My understanding was to get this to trace and keep it at 160 degrees throughout the cook process which took over 6 hrs.After cook, it was a 5 to 1 dilution (water to paste) which I did. I found it to be too watery. The suggestion was iodized salt added to distilled water and use a dropper and put that in the soap mix, stir, and keep adding till consistency is right.That is what I did.My expectations were a nice moisturizing hand soap.What I got was a nice soap that does make my hands feel clean even though the lather isn't great but find I need lotion afterwards because its drying. I thought glycerin or perhaps an aloe extract would aid in the moisturizing. I would like to get the hand soap down pat before trying to do a shower gel. I apologize for the confusion. I just have 6 cups of paste and I have no idea if I can save this by making it more moisturizing and perhaps get it to provide a lather. Thank you

also, If there is something I can add to what already has been diluted and thickened with this salt water, that would be helpful. My main concern is not having to throw away all the paste I have and I want to learn from this.

One way to save your batch and acquire more bubbles to is make a 100% Coconut Oil Paste, dilute just to the point it stops melting the blobs and add some in increments to your original liquid soap. You can also go with 90-95% Coconut oil and 5-10% Castor oil. As far as thickening LS salt only works in very high Olive Oil LS which is why it worked for you. HEC is a thickener that can be used but I recommend working with it in small batches of LS since it can be cranky HEC is Hydroxyethylcellulose. There is a modified one HPMC which is modified hec but harder to find. Xanthum gum is also used but with my gum allergies I have not tried it.

 

[IrishLass]

Unfortunately, the recipe/method that you settled on from the blog doesn't look like one of the best recipes/methods to use for making liquid soap out there.....at least not to me. The internet can be a very dangerous place for new soap-makers because it's very hard to tell a good recipe/method from a bad one at that stage. I'm so glad you were able to find your way here, because we have a good handful of experienced liquid soap-makers with much better recipes/methods.

The biggest failing that I see in the method you used is the huge amount of water added at dilution, and the salt water fix used after the fact. That is completely unnecessary. One should always start with much less water (usually 1 part paste to 1/2 part water), and then work your way up from there until you have the consistency you like (and remember to take notes so you can hit it the first time next time). Adding a salt water solution should only be used for emergency situations when you accidentally added to much water, but even then, there is a much better way to correct a thin soap if you ask me (evaporation by way of applying gentle heat with the cover off....it works great). Adding a salt water solution can be problematic because #1: salt is a lather killer, and #2: there is a point of diminishing returns, i.e., if you go overboard by just one single drop of solution to thicken your soap, it will actually make your soap even thinner than it was before (ask me how I know!)

With the method that I like to use (the glycerin method), no cooking of the soap batter to form the paste is ever required, and it turns out a lovely, bubbly, non-drying liquid soap for me....although one should always keep in mind that lather and feel are subjective, which means that perceptions regarding those things will vary from person to person.

With the glycerin method, the KOH is completely dissolved in boiling hot glycerin, then poured into the melted oils and whisked with a stainless whisk for about 10 minutes (off the heat) to form a good emulsion. Then the pot is covered and left alone (still off the heat) for about 4 to 6 hours, by which time the batter has turned into paste all on its own without any interference from me. I find it to be so simple that I figure one would have to have someone to help them misunderstand it. lol

When I dilute, I use distilled water (always less water to paste....at least at first), but I don't dilute the entire paste at one time. I just dilute about 16 oz. at a time and keep the rest in the fridge until I need to replenish my bottles. To dilute, I stick my paste and water (and whatever other goodies) in a canning jar, cover, and heat in a pot of simmering water to help the paste/water dissolve into liquid soap (usually takes about 1 hour for me).


Edited to add: Gee wiz- you gals are fast! Beat me to it again! LOL


IrishLass

 

[monique]

recipe:
24 ounces olive oil
4 ounces castor oil
5.6 ounces potassium hydroxide
16.6 water (distilled)

is the exact recipe.
dilution was 5 cups dist water to one cup paste
make a mixture of 2 ounces dist water and 0.4 ounces iodized salt
I used about an ounce or just a tad more to 'thicken'

I have not scented or colored
thank you...
I did use the paste to wash hands just now and it seems to be better than my actual 'liquid'
still a bit drying but at least it lathers a bit.
I like your method IrishLass. I will try that next time.
When you say you dilute 16oz in a canning jar, is that the amount of paste or paste and water?

Should a liquid soap be 0% superfatted?

 

[IrishLass]

I like your method IrishLass. I will try that next time.
When you say you dilute 16oz in a canning jar, is that the amount of paste or paste and water?

That's the paste weight only. I use a 32 oz. canning jar for my dilutions. I really like the canning jar method for diluting. It keeps everything neat and tidy and contained with very little chance of evaporation happening.

Should a liquid soap be 0% superfatted?

I superfat mine @3% using SummerbeeMeadow's Advanced Liquid Soap calculator. Also- for what it's worth, I use a ratio of 3 parts water (or glycerin in my case) to 1 part KOH, which is a 25% lye concentration. I've found this to be the best ratio to use when making liquid soap.


IrishLass

 

[DeeAnna]

The lather you get from your undiluted soap paste is going to be pretty much the best lather your soap is capable of making.

Your recipe looks okay as far as being slightly superfatted (not lye heavy) and having enough water for processing.

I'm not sure why the soap is drying to your hands. Some people don't care for the skin feel of olive soap.

Also, if your household water is hard, soap scum will be created when lye soap and hard water minerals react. This scum sticks to the skin and can be irritating or unpleasant. That too might be why the soap feels drying to your skin -- especially if you are used to synthetic detergent cleansers rather than lye soap.