Making soap/ shampoo for 40 people What is a good calculator to use ? seems the bramblberry one does weird stuff ???
Ok susie NO BEER ....The shampoo seemed to turn out great looks kind of rustic . I dont know how to make a recipe with percent’s and it seemed grams was the most accurate way to measure I want to use 1000 grams of tallow could you give me a recipe based on that ? I have more coconut than O.O. so if it is safe to tweek the percentages 30/10 ? It fine if this is in ounces . I am making soap for 40 people one batch this big will give 1/2 of us one bar
Thanks for your help
PLEASE SLOW DOWN. I know you're excited and in the New Hobby Honeymoon phase, but please take that energy and put it into really LEARNING about the craft! You should be able to answer my questions above about why you're using the oils you're using at the amounts you're using, if only so we can understand your thinking and correct any misconceptions you may have.
Also, please make smaller batches. You want to share with everyone and that's great, but don't you want to make sure that the soap works the way you want it to before you go sharing it? A year in and my "standard" batch size is based off of 600-700g oils.
Brambleberry is a decent calculator. Not my favorite as I can't customize things the way I want, but it won't give you a lye-heavy soap.
Spend time learning how to work with percentages. They are our biggest help in both analyzing recipes to make sure they will have the properties we want, as well as in resizing a recipe. A soap with 50% tallow is going to have half of its oils be tallow no matter if I'm making a 1lb batch or a 10lb batch. It also lets me know that half of my oils will be hard, long-lasting, and conditioning in the final bar. You can't know that if you're just measuring out grams and then figuring out what the percentages are later by running it through the
lye calculator. Most calculators (including Brambleberry) have an option where you can enter in the percentages of each oil and then what size you want your total batch to be, and they will figure out how much of each oil to use.
Please tell me why you used so many oils. 7 is too many for a beginner (heck, I max out at 5 oils, and I try to stick to 4!). Not only that, but 5 of your 7 oils are less than 5% each of the total recipe. A good rule of thumb is that an oil needs to make up 5% of the total recipe for you to be able to notice its qualities in the final soap. That olive, safflower, palm, castor, and shea butter? You're not going to get anything out of them. You have coconut taking up 25% of your recipe, and that's too high for a shampoo bar (what you claim you want to make). It's on the high end for a general body bar, even. It will strip everything from hair and turn it to straw.
Please don't take this as discouragement. We really want to help you make the best soap possible. For that to happen, you really do need to stop, listen, and learn.