Advice regarding aloe gel, vegetable purees etc. how much is too much?

[fatpigeon]

Does anyone have a hard-and-fast rule for adding food type additives to soaps? I'm interested in doing an aloe vera and cucumber soap. My theory was that I could replace half of the water amount with a blend of aloe vera gel and cucumber puree (with a little extra water to make it fluid enough).

Theoretical recipe is this:

175g olive oil
175g sheep tallow
100g coconut oil
50g avocado oil
83g water
69g sodium hydroxide
83g aloe and cucumber puree

Or should I drop the aloe/cucumber and up the water a bit?

 

[earlene]

I have never had any trouble when I used a 1:1 exchange of one fluid in place of water for the lye solution. Well, other than some liquids high in sugar content do heat up faster, so that is one thing to be aware of, although I never had a heating problem with Aloe. I never used cucumber, but think its carbohydrate content is very low.

A caution I would suggest is to make sure you count even the bits of pulp as part of the liquid. If you don't, you can end up with an extremely soft soap that may never harden.

I have not put your recipe through a lye calculator, so I don't really know what lye concentration you are using, but as long as the total fluids (including the wet pulp) totals the same as your lye calculator suggests, that should be fine. Hopefully it is a fine puree without any large bits of cucumber.

 

[fatpigeon]

Thanks Earlene,

Will definitely count pulp/solids as part of the liquid. I intend to strain it through my fine mesh seive so I don't get too many chunky bits.

I'm not sure what the lye concentration works out to (not 100% on the terminology yet) but the full liquid component is 33% oil weight, and the NaOH works out to a 5% superfat.

 

[Susie]

Does anyone have a hard-and-fast rule for adding food type additives to soaps? I'm interested in doing an aloe vera and cucumber soap. My theory was that I could replace half of the water amount with a blend of aloe vera gel and cucumber puree (with a little extra water to make it fluid enough).

Theoretical recipe is this:

175g olive oil
175g sheep tallow
100g coconut oil
50g avocado oil
83g water
69g sodium hydroxide
83g aloe and cucumber puree

Or should I drop the aloe/cucumber and up the water a bit?

That's a lot of coconut oil for that recipe.

 

[fatpigeon]

Hi Susie,

I've found multiple recommendations on best usage rates for coconut oil so I was going with 20% (having seen that number pop up frequently). What would you recommend dropping it to?

 

[fatpigeon]

I've tweaked the recipe a bit. Would this be a better balance?

30% Tallow
20% Olive Oil
15% Coconut Oil
10% Avocado Oil
10% Sweet Almond Oil
5% Castor Oil
5% Shea Butter
5% Cocoa Butter

This is mostly just a result of playing around on soapee.com with the oils I have available. I'm open to any suggestions and corrections.

 

[christost7]

I dont think there is right or wrong (except some obvious extremes), it is a matter of personal preferences and lots of experimentation.
Most experienced soapers I know started with 6-7-8 different oils and butters too, but sooner or later settled to simpler recipes of 4-5 oils/butters.
For my personal preferences, I would suggest something like :

40 tallow
25 olive
20 coconut
10 sweet almond
5 castor

The only thing I would experiment with would be the olive/coconut ratio.
Have fun!

 

[cmzaha]

I have used purees up to 100% liquid replacement. I like to buy packages of fruit purees in the frozen section of stores and just keep it frozen. The ones I purchase are frozen flat so I just break up the puree and use it frozen when making my lye solution. If I choose to use fresh purees I usually soap with a 50/50 lye solution, put the fruit or veggie in the blender with enough coconut milk to make up the liquid difference. Doing it with fresh depends how much fresh puree you have.