Castor or Shea Butter

[Lin19687]

If you use Castor at or below 5%, would you swap it for Shea butter?
Not talking about doing 1/2 and 1/2 or swapping out any other oil, just these 2

You lose out on some bubbles but would that small amount of Shea give enough conditioning to really notice.


Yes, yes it all depends on the recipe and skin. But in general would it be worth it. And I don't mean for label appeal.

 

[The Efficacious Gentleman]

Depends on the rest of the recipe in a big way. If you are using 50% of something similar to Shea, or if a lot of your fatty acid profile is similar to Shea, then adding 5% Shea might not be noticeable at all, but you would miss the castor

 

[BattleGnome]

I like Shea in my soaps and don’t use castor. I’m not a bubble oriented person and I feel the switch may come down to that. I tend to use around 20% Shea, so bubble are easily diminished by my recipe. I also use equal amounts of coconut to balance it (no science there, just the recipe I landed on). I also use 5% KOH to combat the olive I used to use (I’m starting to switch to sunflower due to cost)

Would your recipe bubble as well without the castor? 50% or more olive you might notice but in my opinion you may not notice with any other recipe. Dual lye may also effect your need for castor. I’m not sure if anyone has compared castor use to dual lye when it comes to lather.

*this response assumes castor only adds to bubbles and potential solubility. I don’t have much first hand experience with castor to know if it adds more to the table than bubble support.

 

[Lin19687]

That is just what I was wondering if other then a Little bubble support, is it worth the cost ?

Castor is not cheap nor is Shea.
BUT, if Shea was going to give a better condition to a bar at 10% or under it would be worth it I would think, no?

I use Palm/PKO so I was just trying to think if the Castor REALLY makes more bubble support.

I have just never questioned the use of Castor in any recipe........ now I am

 

[BrewerGeorge]

Re: the shea being conditioning thing. I think that is falling into the trap of conflating the characteristics of the oil (butter in this case) with the saponified product in soap. I use butters in vegan soaps to make up for the lack of hard oils like tallow and lard because butters are relatively high in stearic and palmitic. I don't expect them to be more conditioning in the finished soap. I mean, they are also relatively high in oleic acid, but that's never hard to find from any number of other oils so it's never the bottleneck.

From a strictly fatty acids perspective, the castor is added to bring ricolineic acid to the party. Shea won't do that so they are in no way substitutes for each other.

 

[The Efficacious Gentleman]

And not to mention that the fatty acid profile of Shea and palm are not a million miles away from each other. Shea does have more unsaponifiables, which may (big may) come over in to the finished bar. But you could well be adding more of the same.

But try it. Make a batch with the Shea instead of castor and a batch with the castor out and the balance added in to palm. See how you like them. Do blind tests to make sure that the Shea isn't giving a placebo effect

 

[DeeAnna]

Shea adds mildness, similar to lard, palm, or tallow. IMO, soap doesn't condition in the sense that a lotion conditions the skin, but I suppose a milder soap would feel "more conditioning" to many people.

Shea typically has a higher % of unsaponifiables compared with most other soaping fats, especially unrefined shea, but I honestly don't think unsaponifiables make huge differences in the skin feel or mildness of a soap.

Adding or subtracting or substituting any fat at 5% won't have a lot of effect on the overall recipe, with the one possible exception of castor. And I've even dropped castor to zero in most of my recent batches with no noticeable change in the qualities of the soap, so I'm not as certain it's the "bubble maker" that most people think it is.

 

[Lin19687]

@DeeAnna TY I was hoping someone would chime in as to dropping the Castor to see if there was a difference.
@The Efficacious Gentleman - I plan on making a small test batch, but can't mix Lye outside due to neighbors workers and dust. Hope to do HP either tonight if it doesn't rain. I know that palm and Shea are far apart, that was not my point. What I meant when I said the PO/PKO is that I was not worried about bubbles/lather.
Shea has more 'unsaponifiables' so I wondered if that would make a small difference.
@BrewerGeorge not trying to sub one for the other on equality. Looking to change out.

FYI, "condition" as in NON-drying, or countering the drying of other oils. which I think most of us understand... wash off product not lotion.

 

[amd]

Once, I ran out of castor oil and I had some mango butter that I needed to use, so I plugged it in to my recipe in place of the 5% castor oil (running it back through a lye calc of course). I didn't notice a difference in my bars, quite honestly. Now, I know there are differences between mango and shea, so I mention this only because I replaced castor with another butter and at that low of a percentage, I don't think the type of butter really matters. My opinion is that you're not going to see a difference in lather quality at such a low percentage, but you may notice a skin feel difference. An average user might not notice, but a discerning soaper might.

 

[The Efficacious Gentleman]

@DeeAnna TY I was hoping someone would chime in as to dropping the Castor to see if there was a difference.
@The Efficacious Gentleman - I plan on making a small test batch, but can't mix Lye outside due to neighbors workers and dust. Hope to do HP either tonight if it doesn't rain. I know that palm and Shea are far apart, that was not my point. What I meant when I said the PO/PKO is that I was not worried about bubbles/lather.
Shea has more 'unsaponifiables' so I wondered if that would make a small difference.
@BrewerGeorge not trying to sub one for the other on equality. Looking to change out.

FYI, "condition" as in NON-drying, or countering the drying of other oils. which I think most of us understand... wash off product not lotion.

You misunderstood me - palm and Shea are quite similar. They aren't a million miles away from each other.

But please stop saying palm/pko. Palm, lard, and Shea are VERY different from pko. Pko and coconut are very similar. Do not conflate them all like that. A soap with 50% palm and a soap with 50% pko are vastly different things.

 

[Lin19687]

I DO understand that PO and PKO are different, I said "I use Palm/PKO" as in that is in my recipe so the Bubble/lather factor was not an issue for me. Just to clarify.

And I apologize I DID mis-read what you wrote.
But Shea and Palm are very different in the Palmitic and Stearic profiles and slightly in Linoleic.

So back to what I was wondering, is Castor really give THAT much of a lather boost at 5% to make it worth it
Or would Shea, at 5 -10% make a better difference in a bar .

not trying to fight here, sometimes it is hard to show what is being asked on the interwebs
looking to see if anyone has taken out or added one of these 2 and noticed a difference.

 

[The Efficacious Gentleman]

As I said, give it a try. Some people will not make a "normal" bar without castor, others (such as DeeAnna) can take or leave it.

But do try it with the Shea but also with extra palm. You might not notice the difference between those two. I know that many people who replaced their Shea with lard could not honestly tell the difference between the two, so it is really worth seeing if the Shea is worth it for you

 

[earlene]

I have also removed Castor several times and I personally do not notice much of a difference in the soap. Have I purposefully subbed the Castor with something else? Only once that I recall, where what I used was Sesame Oil instead of Castor. Every other time, it was just that I didn't have Castor on hand, so I just made the soap without it. Of course, I do always run any changes through a lye calculator before making the soap.

But then, I'm not one to care that much about copious bubbles, either. IF bubbles are important, I suggest subbing with Hemp Oil. I have found that a 100% Hemp oil soap is very bubbly, and also used it at 10% in 4 experimental recipes last December. I don't specifically recall how each of them bubbled, but I do recall a very creamy lather with each. They all had some CO as well so bubbly would be expected anyway, as it would with your PKO.

However, I did a handwashing test of a recent dual lye soap (January 19, 20018) that is Castor-free and it is bubbly and produces a very creamy lather. Per my notes in my soaping notebook the formula follows:

53% OO
32% RBO
10% CO
5% Shea

33% [Lye] (which equals 95% NaOH + 5% KOH)
3% SF

other additives: EDTA, fragrance, colorants

So in this case, I would say the dual lye probably helped, but from the standpoint of using only 5% Shea as opposed to 5% Castor, it might be similar to what you are looking at testing. Except I don't know how 'conditioning' your other oils are, so maybe it doesn't correlate because OO & RBO are pretty high on the conditioning scale already.