Bubbly lather in non palm oil soap?

[IrishLass]

Hi all

Thanks for all these helpful replies and suggestions. That recipe looks good but also breaks the "rules" no cocoa butter over 15% or your soap will crack!!! (The other one being - no coconut oil over 30% or your skin will dry up). Perhaps I am getting too hung up on the "rules" and also am probably suffering from soap envy. I will try a few things though. But I guess LilyJo is right and what pleases one won't necessarily please another. I'll let you know if I achieve my dream recipe.

Yep- you're getting too hung up on the so-called 'rules'. One of the recipes I tried out in the first year of in my soapy adventures (2006) was actually called 'Breaking the Rules' soap. lol I found it on the internet, but unfortunately, I can't remember who it was at the moment. I'll have to search my notes. Anyway, it contained 75% coconut oil and 25% cocoa butter and it made a great soap. I make a variation of it nowadays with 70% coconut oil and 30% mango butter, superfatted at 15%.


IrishLass

 

[WeaversPort]

Yes Aihrait, I have to admit I'm not a very scientific soaper. I do try a few experiments but I find the huge time that CP soap making takes is hugely frustrating - 4-6 weeks before you can even use your soap, and if you want to test things like longevity the another 6-8 weeks on top of that. At the moment with 4 recipes on the go I am doing everything 4 times. In the bath the other day I washed one arm with shea without caster, one arm with shea with castor, one leg each with shea and cocoa butter with and without caster etc . Its very exhausting. I've got all the different soaps in different colours so I can tell the difference and I've written all down with all the ingredients to last gram. I'm also testing essential oils and natural colourants, so I've paprika at trace, paprika in the lye sieved out, 5 fold orange oil, 10 fold orange at 2% and 3%, with patchouli and without, with powdered orange peel and without, and that's just the orange ones! I'm going to end up buried under a vast soap mountain. I was thinking of trying hot process to try and speed things up a bit but I've remembered I donated my mum's crockpot to the charity that I'm doing the soaps for! I'll have to try and cadge it back off them.

Happy times! Its certainly keeping me busy.

This sounds way more scientific than I am! I have a bunch of notes just scrawled on the recipes I print out.. :think:

 

[JuliaNegusuk]

Hi all. I got some great replies on this question varying from quite complicated suggestions to quite simple ones, and, surprise surprise, I went for the simple ones and tried adding a small amount of sugar to one recipe and subbing 10% of the olive oil with sweet almond oil in another. I found both worked well. The one I added sugar to was still quite high on coconut oil, 35%, with 50% olive oil and 5% each cocoa butter, shea butter and castor oil - I'm going for affordable luxury! I added about 1% sugar to oil weight, using raw brown sugar (though don't suppose it matters what kind) and everyone liked the smooth silky bubbles it produced. My personal favourite however was the SAO, which I thought produced a lovely lather (recipe - 30% olive oil, 35% coconut oil, 20% shea, 10% SAO, 5% caster oil). I have never soaped with this oil before but I think I will now routinely include it in more of my recipes as the lather it produced was so nice -the oil is expensive though, I might try at 5%.

The oil I'm not sure about is caster oil. Everyone on-line seems to rave about how even small amounts helps produce a long lasting lather etc but neither me nor my testers could tell any difference between otherwise identical recipes, with or without 5% caster oil. May be I'm not using enough but people seem to say that caster oil makes soap go soft at higher amounts and I hate soft soap. As it is quite pricey I may try an SAO one without caster oil and see what that's like.

Definite no no is rapeseed oil. I used this to make a cheap recipe to test the aromas and natural colours, but despite using oil with a sell by date of Dec 2017 all of the soaps made with this have gone DOSsy to varying degrees, some after days, others after a few weeks. Ironically the recipe (50% rapeseed oil, 30% coconut oil, 20% palm oil) produced super, thick, creamy lather that I really liked, (though perhaps a tad "sticky") but perhaps that was the palm oil influence. Anyhow I won't be using rapeseed oil again.

Thanks for your advice. If I get around to trying any of the other suggestions I'll give you feedback but right now I am partially buried under a small soap mountain so I won't be experimenting for a while.