Hello good people of the Soap Making Forum.
This is my first post and i am afraid it might be a bit of a hard one, but first a short introduction:
Since a few years i have been making soap for myself because i have irritable skin and none of the store bought soaps did me any good. After a while people asked me for soaps and i started handing it out to friends, family and coworkers. Not to long ago their friends, families and coworkers started to want my soaps as well. Now that my soaps are not distributed to people whom i know personally i figured it was time to step up my game, and what better way than to read Scientific Soapmaking by Kevin Dunn?
On to the problem at hand:
The book was great and i learnt a lot, but some of the things i would like to try out requires ethanol. Where i live it is impossible to get pure ethanol legally and even if i wanted to, there is simply no way i could get access to it illegally either. Since i am not a chemist this leads me to a bit of a problem.
The question is, basically, if you could use isopropyl alcohol (isopropanol) rather than ethyl alcohol (ethanol)? Specifically if you could use it for the analysis of excess alkali in soap, as outlined in chapter 15, pages 245 to 249? Isopropyl alcohol is readily available in local stores and the phenolphthalein can be ordered, so this is pretty much the only way forward for me unless i want to travel to Germany and smuggle some ethanol back home.
Thank you in advance, Bengt.
This is my first post and i am afraid it might be a bit of a hard one, but first a short introduction:
Since a few years i have been making soap for myself because i have irritable skin and none of the store bought soaps did me any good. After a while people asked me for soaps and i started handing it out to friends, family and coworkers. Not to long ago their friends, families and coworkers started to want my soaps as well. Now that my soaps are not distributed to people whom i know personally i figured it was time to step up my game, and what better way than to read Scientific Soapmaking by Kevin Dunn?
On to the problem at hand:
The book was great and i learnt a lot, but some of the things i would like to try out requires ethanol. Where i live it is impossible to get pure ethanol legally and even if i wanted to, there is simply no way i could get access to it illegally either. Since i am not a chemist this leads me to a bit of a problem.
The question is, basically, if you could use isopropyl alcohol (isopropanol) rather than ethyl alcohol (ethanol)? Specifically if you could use it for the analysis of excess alkali in soap, as outlined in chapter 15, pages 245 to 249? Isopropyl alcohol is readily available in local stores and the phenolphthalein can be ordered, so this is pretty much the only way forward for me unless i want to travel to Germany and smuggle some ethanol back home.
Thank you in advance, Bengt.
