Help please. I’m new and rubbish.....

[Claire M]

I am a very arty-crafty person and so I thought I would have a go at making soap. I do some craft markets and love the idea of being able to sell pretty homemade scented soaps...but so far everything has been a disaster....can someone please tell me where I am going wrong?
Last night I tried to make coconut oil, olive oil and lavender soap. I know I put slightly the wrong amount of water in it because I messed converting US measurements to UK measurement but I tried to work with it...and it was a mess. It looked like lumpy French salad dressing - gloopy and oily and it just would not trace (and I used a blender). So I googled and tried to save it using the HP...I warmed it over a pan of simmering water in another pan over the top..and it just looked burnt, like the oil was sitting at the top and there was a sludge of ever increasingly darker brown grit at the bottom. Chucked that away.
Tried again this morning being ever so careful to get everything exact and precise and exactly the same thing happened. It thickened slightly but no trace...not after an hour with a hand blender. Now it’s sitting in a crock (slow cooker) and I have no idea how it will turn out. Does anyone have any ideas please? X

 

[The Efficacious Gentleman]

First off, the UK is still has the EU cosmetic rules and will very likely still have it post Brexit, so you need to look in to the works (and costs!) involved in selling soap. Secondly, learning to make soap in order to sell it is putting the cart before the horse somewhat.

That said, did you use a lye calculator to double check your conversations? What was the original recipe and what did you get it to be? What was the process that you followed?

 

[shunt2011]

Hello and Welcome! I have to agree with TEG.

You first need to learn how to correctly make soap and then test it for the long term before even consider selling. You would do well to read the first 10 or more pages in the beginners sections and the peruse the other sections of the forum and gain simple knowledge on how to use soap calculators and how to formulate correctly.

Also posting your complete recipe and process will help as well for us to help troublshoot.

 

[Claire M]

Well yes, my visions of selling beautiful soap were not intended to happen overnight...that’s for sure.
And yes, I followed. Lye calc and did everything by the book but I end up with something that looks like French onion soup, brown and greasy.

 

[lsg]

Soaping101 and Soapqueen both have great YouTube tutorials for beginners.

 

[The Efficacious Gentleman]

Well yes, my visions of selling beautiful soap were not intended to happen overnight...that’s for sure.
And yes, I followed. Lye calc and did everything by the book but I end up with something that looks like French onion soup, brown and greasy.

But you're still not giving us anything with which we can help you. We need to know what you did with which recipe including any scent etc. Otherwise it would be just shooting in the dark.

 

[DeeAnna]

"...I followed. Lye calc and did everything by the book but I end up with something that looks like French onion soup, brown and greasy...."

You think you did "everything by the book," but your method or recipe obviously strayed from the book at some point. If you would like help to troubleshoot your failed batch, kindly take the time to provide your recipe -- all ingredients in weights -- and explain specifically what you did to make the soap. Without that information, the best advice you are likely to get is the advice that you've already gotten -- read the beginner's forum and watch soap making videos.

 

[Petraji]

I agree with lsg -please learn from scratch how to make soap.
The videos by 'THE SOAP QUEEN" or "SOAPING 101" - or similar - are a must for beginners.
Someone said you are putting the cart before the horse- I agree totally. Take time to experiment with simple and safe recipes so that you become comfortable with what you are doing.
Reading your post I am also concerned about your personal safety. You are dealing with LYE, it is a potentially dangerous chemical. PLEASE, don't be so rushed on selling yet; you have to make sure that both you and your product is absolutely safe. Then you get into "labeling" which is another horse of a different color....

 

[dixiedragon]

Can you tell us where you got your recipe?

 

[Josie]

Hi, and welcome to the soaking world. I remember when I first started and my first batch was a complete failure. It volcanoed, riced and all sort. I took another look at the recipe (tried making it again but omitting some ingredients so see what eas the issue) and found the using the coconut FO was issue. It didn't take well to the recipe at all. So you may need to do the same exercise - try the same recipes but remove one or two of the ingredients to see where the root of the issue is.

 

[IrishLass]

Welcome Claire!

Posting the entire recipe you used in weight, the type of lye you used (NaOH or KOH), and walking us through the steps you took from beginning to end will be of tremendous help in enabling us to pinpoint what went wrong, because there are so many variables involved in soap-making. It could be any one or more of them that caused things to go south, depending.

For example, the oil and water part of recipe might possibly be fine, but maybe you mistakenly used KOH instead of NaOH as your lye. If so, the batter will not trace the way an NaOH batch would.....nor end up as a nice hard bar of soap as is typical of NaOH bars. Or maybe the lye to water concentration % was too low. Or maybe there wasn't enough lye for the type and amounts of fats. Or maybe too much lavender scent was used for the size batch. Or maybe the recipe itself was just a bad recipe. You see what I mean.


IrishLass