Time for some
wrap-ups and status reports!
Canology (7½ months in)
Pro: It's got abundant yet creamy lather, and it's all in all a nice bar of soap. It stayed with its muted creamy olive colour. and is remarkably long-lasting. Warm, dry, yet slightly chalky skin feel. The tightness mellowed out.
Con: A bit too hard and brittle for my taste. Slightly rough and “sandy” to the touch (but less severe than earlier on)
Verdict: A few months in, this soap had made me wonder if high-stearic/elaidic (canola/soy wax) was any good, but it turned out to be alright. I like a more balanced P/S ratio better.
Maximum Sunflowers (8½ months in)
Pro: The turquoise colour of the 480 ppm ROE completely vanished. None of the soaps smells in any way.
Con: All three soaps, with and without ROE, caught some (more) DOS! But it's still superficial spots only, not an invasion of the complete soap body.
Verdict: The ROE advantage wrt rancidity has gone. 50% linoleic acid is just too much to keep the DOS demons at distance over the months. I love how silken the soaps feel. DOS danger aside, high-linoleic soaps really are worth the waiting. Time to test these as soaps?
Red Palm LS (10 months in)
Not much left, but still going strong! The colour speaks for itself. And it kept its sweet smell.
PumpKinG (6 months in)
Leakage! It turns out the airless bottles aren't quite as watertight as I had expected. A good part of the LS has found its way past the movable stopper inside the airless bottle, to collect at the bottom of the cylinder – and worse: since airless bottles are open at the underside (for air pressure reasons), it leaked
out of the bottle!
The LS itself has a lovely, honey-thick consistency, is deep brownish-red and fully transparent, but I had to dilute it once. Since the invention of the PumpKinG™, my
understanding of LS viscosity has grown a lot, and should I aim for “on point bottle fermentation” again, it'd be much less guesswork.
MUFA chain length comparison (6 months in)
HL Safflower (18:1) – Typical castile: hardened up nicely, made up the mediocre lather but a surplus in ropy slime instead. Not overly long-lasting. Leavesthe skin with the archetypal “castile dry”, chalky-dry feel.
Abyssinia (22:1) – kept its translucent look and gummy feel. Pulls and soaks moisture from everywhere and becomes even softer then. Dissolves quicker into thick slime, that however has less of the “castile ropy” character. Virtually zero lather, even than the safflower castile. Very roughly speaking, it appears that
erucic acid somewhat compares to oleic acid, but it seems to complicate/impede hardening, and lowers the onset of gelling, to give soap that is very soluble, translucent, and flexible, at least over months of curing.
Macadamia (16:1) – Initially hardened up quickest, but also avidly soaks up any water it is in contact with. Dissolves very quickly and gives off glue-like (but “short”, non-ropy) slime. In contrast to the others, it lathers up very nicely to give fluffy and dense (but not creamy) lather. On skin, much less of the chalky castile-dry feel. FWIW,
palmitoleic acid isn't easily integrated into the raster of “major” FAs. For one, it resembles oleic acid when it comes to the solid, dry soap (cure time, hardness), but from the lathering, it resembles more the likes of lauric/myristic acid from coconut & friends. Hence, while my observations are in line with those of
@ngian, I can't fully agree with his
conclusion to treat C16:1 like C16:0. In any case, it's another building block in debunking the lard myth (lard contains some palmitoleic acid, and becomes exchangeable with the introduction of macadamia).
Salt & erythritol bars (5 months in)
So far, I've only given the salt bar and the 50/50 bar a single test. They're bubbling up nicely, no skin irritation, but scratchy and rough to the touch. Guess I'll give them another few months. At least they have lost their yellowish colour (pretty sure it was some red palm oil cross-contamination), and their weird off-smell.
Hardness-boosted safflower cubes (6 months in)
Soon after review, I've grated them up to have some white confetti. Several weeks later, these gratings are still soft and slightly sticky/greasy (like parmesan cheese), and don't crumble into powder easily. I suspect that the tiny batch sizes somehow messed up with superfat.
Very Balanced™ (2 months in)
Crazy stupid idea, but it turned out to be a lovely soap! Hardened up nicely, agate-like shine, handsome to the touch, dense & through-the-roof lather – in short, a bit of everything!