Liquid soap with NaOH???

[Obsidian]

I didn't measure that water I added but if I had to guess, it was around 2 cups to a 4-5 ounce bar of soap. At first it turned into a giant clear glob of snotty slime but that eventually diluted down into a nice thick texture. After I get it bottled, if it seems a bit too thick, I'll add in another ounce or so of water.
I used a 1.5 year old bar, grated really fine. It takes scent well too, better then regular LS.

 

[DeeAnna]

A member of a Facebook liquid soapmaking groups reports the LS she made with NaOH is beginning to solidify a month after it was made. Unfortunately I'm not sure what her recipe is. I thought it was interesting that it took a fair amount of time before this particular NaOH soap showed it's usual behavior of wanting to firm up.

 

[Susie]

I have been following that conversation, and I was wondering how long it would take. There may be some magic ingredient/time/process combination that works, but I don't think anyone is even close to solving it with anything we have seen thus far.

 

[Seawolfe]

I hab developed a vey seekrit recipe to make crystal clear liquid soap from scratch that is pH 7 using seekrit ingredients you may already have. Just send me 14 dollars in unmarked bills and I will share this amazing seekrit with you.

 

[pamielynn]

Seawolfe, you want non-sequential bills? I'll meet you in the back alley to get those "seekrit ingrdientz"

 

[Seawolfe]

Yes no sequenced. I will be the one dressed like a ninja, you will know me by the stickblender I carry.

 

[Susie]

LOL, I love it!

 

[DeeAnna]

Here are my latest adventures related to this topic --

I used a bar of my superlye castile to replicate Dawn's NaOH liquid soap. I grated the bar, added distilled water, warmed the mess gently in the microwave, and stirred to dissolve.

The dilution I needed to get a honey-thick consistency at room temperature was 9 or 10 parts water to 1 part grated soap. I gradually worked up to that amount of water. At a ratio of 2 parts water to 1 part soap, the product was like clear golden Jello (gelatine). The texture gradually became softer and more gooey, but remained a non-pourable goopy gel-like stuff as I added more and more water. Right at 9-10 parts water to soap, the texture shifted from a not-very-easy-to-pour gel to a pourable liquid.

At a pourable consistency, the lather is creamy as I would expect from a castile but the product makes a below average amount of suds. One issue that causes the low lather is the nature of castile -- the oleic acid in olive oil naturally doesn't form a lot of suds. The other issue is the diluted product contains only 9% to 10% actual soap for this product. Irish Lass' liquid soap recipe results in about 38% actual soap in the LS when diluted per her instructions.

I've used the NaOH castile LS twice now as a shampoo. Both times, the lather on first wash was minimal and left my hair feeling rough after I rinsed out the soap. On second wash, the soap lathered better and my hair felt soft after a good rinse. I don't normally lather twice, but this soap seems to need that to perform as well as possible.

I will set a sample aside to sit for a month or so and see what it's like after that time.

 

[DeeAnna]

Tentatively, I'm inclined to agree with Dawn -- a decent NaOH liquid soap may be possible if you carefully minimize certain fatty acids. I honestly don't think HOW the soap is made makes any difference -- do a CP or HP bar soap method or a LS method; it doesn't make a "hill o' beans" difference to the outcome.

Dawn and I are reporting good luck with olive oil soap. According to Soapcalc, olive is 17% stearic+palmitic, 83% oleic+linoleic. Dawn reported bad results with palm/coconut/olive and coconut/olive recipes. Susie has had bad luck with vegetable shortening/CO/castor. Rhonda has had bad results from lard/CO/castor. Today, someone on Facebook showed a successful NaOH LS made with coconut/olive/canola she made this past February.

My best guess is that large amounts of stearic and palmitic acids will be a big problem with an NaOH liquid soap. Lauric and myristic acids might be okay in moderate doses. Oleic and linoleic acids are probably the safest. My next post will explain more about why I think this -- bear with me for now. Since we don't generally soap with fatty acids, we need to identify the fats that provide fatty acids that may work best in an NaOH LS.

Lauric and myristic acids come from coconut oil, babassu, and palm kernel oil, but these fats also provide a dab of palmitic and stearic acids. That may be why a recipe with these fats may or may not work well.

Oleic acid comes from fats such as olive, sweet almond, and avocado. Linoleic acid comes from fats like sunflower, safflower, corn, canola, etc.

Fats to definitely avoid would be ones such as tallow, palm, lard, and butters because they are very high in palmitic and stearic acids.

 

[DeeAnna]

I was doing some reading in the book "Soaps and Proteins" by Martin Fischer, published 1921, as I was thinking about this topic.

You know how you all were having to add amazing amounts of water to your NaOH soaps to get them to form a pourable liquid?

It turns out Fischer was intrigued by this very thing. He did some experiments looking at how much water can be absorbed by a pure soap (a soap made with just one fatty acid) before it turned from a non-pourable gel into a pourable liquid.

He reported that he had to add a whopping 88 grams of water to 1 gram of pure sodium stearate (soap made with stearic acid) before the soap finally started to turn from a gel to a liquid.

Sodium palmitate absorbed 72 grams of water, sodium myristate absorbed 48 grams, and sodium laurate soaked up just 18 grams.

Susie and Rhonda added ridiculous amounts of water to the soaps they made for this thread, and still had trouble with the soaps not staying fluid. Since their soaps were made with CO (mostly myristic, lauric), castor (ricinoleic), and veg shortening/lard (mostly palmitic, stearic), their findings are similar to Fischer's.

By contrast, sodium oleate (soap made with oleic acid) and sodium linolate (soap from linoleic acid) absorbed a mere 3 grams of water per gram of soap before these soaps started to turn into pourable liquids.

edit: That may be why Dawn and I are seeing reasonable results by turning our NaOH olive oil soap bars into LS -- olive is mostly oleic acid. Dawn said (speaking here from memory) that she diluted 1 part soap with 4 parts water. That is pretty darn close to Fischer's 3:1 dilution. I diluted 1 part soap with 9-10 parts water which is much higher rate of dilution. Maybe my olive oil had a higher % of stearic and palmitic than Dawn's? Not sure, since I can't analyze the fatty acid content of a fat. roblem:

Fischer's results seem to reinforce our results and my guesses about what fats may work best for an NaOH liquid soap.

 

[DeeAnna]

Many folks seem to be eager to jump on the NaOH LS bandwagon, but I have to say I'm growing even more lukewarm about the idea now that I'm starting to see a pattern emerging. I can see some advantages:

You can make liquid soap without using KOH. This can be good if you can't get KOH due to legal and practical restrictions.
You can easily convert a suitable bar soap into LS, so you can make two products from one recipe.

But I can see disadvantages:

Fats that make a non-snotty NaOH LS are limited -- tentatively you would need to use mostly liquid fats with perhaps a small amount of coconut or PKO.
The amount of water needed to dilute a suitable NaOH soap into a pourable liquid is very large, so the finished soap may not lather or clean well simply because there's a lot of water and not much soap.
If large amounts of liquid fats are used to make this type of soap, the soap may not lather well and may become rancid quickly due to the high % of unsaturated fats in the recipe.
This type of soap may not give super reliable results because it appears to be sensitive to the fatty acid composition. We can't see or measure these chemicals in our fats and the composition of any fat is variable. This means we can't be certain we've got the right blend of fats to make a non-snotty soap.

 

[Susie]

I am interested to see what you get at a month with that experiment. However, I sort of wondered if the percentage of water in the grated soap/liquid soap would negatively impact the lather and performance. So, at least I now know I was not completely thinking the wrong thing.

 

[DeeAnna]

"...I sort of wondered if the percentage of water in the grated soap/liquid soap would negatively impact the lather and performance. So, at least I now know I was not completely thinking the wrong thing. ..."

You're spot-on right to think this, Susie. Even with the olive oil soap, the large amount of dilution needed to get to a thick but pourable consistency is a problem.

 

[Dorymae]

I wonder what would happen if you mixed a surfactant in the dilution water. Something like slsa? Do you think it would help with the lather?

 

[DeeAnna]

It certainly might, Dorymae. Many commercial products are mixtures of true soaps and non-soap detergents, so it seems likely that your idea would work. But I'm thinking that I would not be eager to fix an NaOH liquid soap that doesn't clean or lather well by adding a syndet. Instead, I might want to make the recipe with KOH and add a syndet to the KOH soap to tweak it if I wanted to. That way I'd be adding the syndet to enhance an already good product rather than using the syndet to prop up a less-than-stellar product. Just my quick reaction to the idea, but it's just my opinion ... maybe you see it differently?

 

[DawninWA]

The last batch I made I got distracted while grating and forgot how much soap I used. I ended up putting the grated soap in a 1 quart mason jar, it filled up half the jar, and I filled the jar to the top with water. This resulted in very thick but pourable soap. Diluted a little more (half again was too much) worked well. The resulting liquid soap doesn't lather as much as a soap with coconut oil or detergents, but still seems to lather better than the castile bar soap. I wonder what effect castor oil would have. I had the same results with washing hair. First lather produced very few suds. Second made lots of them.

Some other things, in case you were curious. My bars are superfatted at 5%. If I dilute the soap too much, the extra oil separates a little after a few days. If I keep it thick, it doesn't. I use tap water for making my soap and diluting it. We have "moderately hard" water here, according to the charts. I don't know if this makes a difference, but it seems like it would. And my bars were all made last May/June. I've had the same results diluting them after a month or several months.

I'm actually not convinced that you can't liquefy a coconut oil bar, as I have, in the past, liquefied both a kirks coco-castile bar (coconut is the only oil) and a jr liggetts shampoo bar (olive, coconut, castor). I kept these very liquidy, much like liquid dr bronners soap. They performed about the same too, suds-wise. But when I attempted a coconut/olive bar I made, it turned to snot. I'm pretty sure that that is the batch I accidentally dumped a half an ounce of orange eo into (little dropper part was missing, oops), so I may try that one again. Dr bronners bar soap, Mrs Meyers, all of my bars with palm oil, and my coconut/olive/mostly lard laundry bar all DO NOT liquefy well.

 

[DeeAnna]

I did the same thing with my bar of olive oil soap -- grated it, put it into a quart jar, and filled the jar with distilled water. Heated gently, stirred until all dissolved, and let cool. I can turn this jar upside down, shake it, and nothing will remotely pour -- it has the texture and firmness of Jello. I guess our different experiences all goes back to that all-purpose saying -- YMMV!

 

[DeeAnna]

Update about the liquid soap I described in Posts 68 and 69 -- it's been over 10 days now. The diluted soap is gradually changing from a smooth honey consistency into a lumpy gel. The overall thickness is about the same, but the texture is less appealing -- I don't like lumpy liquid soap any more than I like lumpy gravy. :thumbdown: The lather is, if anything, even poorer now than when first made -- I only see traces of suds when I lather it up with my hands and almost no suds when I use the soap on a washcloth. Again, I think this is due to the low-sudsing nature of 100% olive oil soap and due to the small % of actual soap in the diluted product (only about 10% soap).

My verdict as a bath and hand soap: Unacceptable.

The results from making liquid soap from an all-NaOH recipe seem to be really variable, and the success or failure doesn't seem to be linked to any particular blend of fats or any given technique. I'll continue to keep an open mind about the idea, but so far, this method is a major bust -- it's not a reliable way to make liquid soap.

 

[Obsidian]

My 100% castile bar soap dissolved into liquid stayed fluid but it did get a little snottier as time went on. I got the same lower lather results as deeanna and since I dislike castile anyways, I tossed mine.

 

[DeeAnna]

I think I will use at least some of mine for wet-fiber felting, a new craft I'm learning about lately.

My interest in this started when I tried to felt some of my bar soaps, but I didn't have the best of results. The half dozen bars I felted took forever and the results were really frustrating, but I could see how it could be really pretty so I got stubborn and decided to learn more.

I signed up for a class to learn more about wet-felting from a local gal who is a wizard at this thing. I figured at the very least, I might finally learn how to felt those doggone soaps with better results. We started by laying out a flat mat of loose wool on a plastic-covered table, and then the instructor had us spritz the mat of wool with a mild, low sudsing, alkaline soap before starting the felting process. She explained the soap would help the felting go faster by opening up the cuticles of the wool fibers so they can interlock easier.

Bingo -- the light dawned after I made this olive oil soap gel. I think it might be perfect for felting -- an olive oil soap naturally has a higher pH than soaps made with other fats and the low lather is certainly a plus! And the lumpy gel texture is no big deal.