Orange (Peel) Wax

[Richard Perrine]

Oh, the CP kills the fragrance. Nowhere near as strong as HP as my transparent soap process requires. [emoji851]

 

[Mobjack Bay]

It will take a more experience member to diagnose based on the photos. In the details you provided above above, you mentioned that you added 5 mls of orange wax as if it was an EO. Did you do the same for the cp soap recipe? What was the weight of oils for the cp batter? For the all orange soap I made, I used lanolin as a surrogate for the orange wax in SoapCalc, used a recipe with 50% PO, 15% CO, 3% orange wax and the rest soft oils, but then forgot the 5% castor oil. That would mean that I was low on the SF, but it passed the zap test the next day. I use 33% lye concentration. My orange wax is very thick.

the CP kills the fragrance.

I couldn’t smell the orange at all in mine right after I made it and then it was back the next day

 

[Richard Perrine]

It will take a more experience member to diagnose based on the photos. In the details you provided above above, you mentioned that you added 5 mls of orange wax as if it was an EO. Did you do the same for the cp soap recipe? What was the weight of oils for the cp batter? For the all orange soap I made, I used lanolin as a surrogate for the orange wax in SoapCalc, used a recipe with 50% PO, 15% CO, 3% orange wax and the rest soft oils, but then forgot the 5% castor oil. That would mean that I was low on the SF, but it passed the zap test the next day. I use 33% lye concentration. My orange wax is very thick.

Yes, same concentration as the previous soap. 5ml. It's what I typically do with my CP soap w/o problems. I think I've decided not to use it in CP as much. I love how it holds in my HP soap. I will make a non-transparent HP soap test next using the 5ml of wax.

 

[Mobjack Bay]

@Richard Perrine was the batter fine when you poured it into the mold. The texture looks a bit like this.

 

[Richard Perrine]

Mojack. My batter did not look like that at all. It was smooth and maroon in color. I wonder if it was a false trace now that I think of about it. I added the wax after what looked like light trace and only stirred it into the batter for a few seconds to disperse. I wonder if all the unsaponifiables interfered with proper saponification of the soap as it set.

 

[Mobjack Bay]

Mojack. My batter did not look like that at all. It was smooth and maroon in color. I wonder if it was a false trace now that I think of about it. I added the wax after what looked like light trace and only stirred it into the batter for a few seconds to disperse. I wonder if all the unsaponifiables interfered with proper saponification of the soap as it set.

I don’t have enough experience to offer much insight, but I wonder if you would have better luck by incorporating the orange wax in the oil calculation, which is what I did. I used lanolin as the surrogate. That gives you a reasonable estimates of the amount of lye needed and takes the unsaponifiables into account. You could probably still add some orange EO, which I think would up the orange peel notes. I think those are a little subdued in my soaps, which tend to smell more like the whole orange.

 

[Mobjack Bay]

Here’s an update on my orange peel wax soaps. They were all made CP and using lanolin as a surrogate for the wax in Soapcalc. Method details given above. The orange scent has held nicely in all of them and is strongest in the center soap, which had 3% wax in the oil phase. It’s still a bit early since the soap is just under a month old. I will try to remember to update again in a few months.

P.S. the center one has some annatto powder added for a more intense orange color.

 

[Richard Perrine]

This is my recent CP soap using my own recipe. I use OJ instead of water to dissolve lye. This soap contains 10% orange wax. Lovely colour and fragrance. No essential oils added. Pleased with the consistency of the batter and firmness. Thanks Mobjack!



BTW, the transparent, glyercin soap with orange wax was a hit with my son!

 

[Mobjack Bay]

This is my recent CP soap using my own recipe. I use OJ instead of water to dissolve lye. This soap contains 10% orange wax. Lovely colour and fragrance. No essential oils added. Pleased with the consistency of the batter and firmness. Thanks Mobjack!

View attachment 39921 View attachment 39920

BTW, the transparent, glyercin soap with orange wax was a hit with my son!

Fantastic! I’m so glad that you got it to work and that your son likes it. Win! Win!

P.S. did you use anything else for color? The color looks great.

 

[Richard Perrine]

Fantastic! I’m so glad that you got it to work and that your son likes it. Win! Win!

P.S. did you use anything else for color? The color looks great.

All the colour from orange peel wax and OJ. The OJ, when exposed to lye, turns an orange-red in colour.

 

[HowieRoll]

Inspired by this post, I wanted to make a CP soap with orange wax (hope it's okay to add my experience to this thread even though the last post was 6 months ago - please let me know if you'd rather I start a new post).

Thanks to all who contributed here, as I relied on your experience!

The orange wax came from New Directions Aromatics, and their Quality & Regulatory Information indicates it's safe to use in soap up to 20%.

I made the soap Nov. 15, 2019, and thanks to Mobjack Bay, used lanolin liquid wax in place of orange wax on SoapCalc.com. Here is the recipe I used (20 oz of oils total):

25% Olive Oil
25% Soy Wax
20% Coconut Oil
10% Sunflower Oil (HO)
10% Shea Butter
10% Orange Wax

5% Superfat
35% Lye concentration

Added:
1 oz (5% oil weight) Sugar
0.6oz Orange 5-fold EO
0.4oz Benzoin Resinoid
Titanium Dioxide (to lighten part of it for swirl)

PROCESS: I added the orange wax to the oils and stirred it in prior to adding the lye. Brought the batch to emulsion and added the EOs, stickblending a little bit more. The batter thickened slightly but was still very fluid. I took about 20% and added a bunch of TD (left the rest au naturale), then was able to pour and do the swirl. By this point the batter was just starting to thicken, but in a good way so that the swirls would be more defined.

SCENT: there is a definite orange scent! The soap is only 7 weeks old but is still strongly-scented, and the underlying scent is more like the sharp peel smell rather than a freshly opened orange smell. This is what the orange wax smells like OOB to me, too, and is why I added the orange EO (trying to brighten it up) and benzoin (trying to sweeten it up). However. To my nose, there is now an underlying, unpleasant wet dog smell while in use, and I'm not sure if it is due to the scent additions. But my husband doesn't find this to be the case, and just says it is a pleasant orange smell.

COLOR: other than TD, no color was added. The resulting burnt-orange color is all from the wax.

LATHER: at 10%, the orange wax colors the lather. I keep a white washcloth in the shower to color test soaps, and it doesn't appear to stain. But anyone who gets one of these also gets a warning not to use a light-colored cloth to be on the safe side.

Here are a couple photos. The first one is the day it was born and freshly in the mold, and the second one I took today to show the color (this is the back side of the soap so you can see more of the dark orange color).

Whoa, sorry for such a long post, and again, thanks to those who contributed their experiences!

 

[Richard Perrine]

Thank you, Angela. I have made a few bars using my transparent formula and my CP formula. In both cases, I add the orange wax separate from any lye consideration. So, it acts as a superfatting ingredient, not entirely reacted with lye. I get pretty good results, but it does stain. And the orange scent...whoohoo!

 

[Mobjack Bay]

@HowieRoll Your results are a great contribution to this thread. Thanks especially for providing the details. The soap looks great, but I’m sorry to hear that your batch smells a bit like wet dog . I haven’t had that impression with my wax, but everything I read about the wax says it can vary considerably from batch to batch. Or, it could be the nose to nose issue. I think I wrote somewhere above that the first soaps I made didn’t smell quite as bright/sharp as orange EO, but more like a whole orange, which seems to be the opposite of your impression. One of the technical documents on the New Directions website identifies the main constituent as citral, with almost no limonene, which I think is the dominant constituent of orange EO.

I haven’t made a soap with more than 3% and haven’t noticed any staining at that percentage.

No acceleration for you! I need to go back and check my recipes and temperatures because I have definitely had major issues with acceleration using the wax I have at 3% of total oils. What temperature were you working at? I recently added 2% orange wax to a batch of 100% OO soaps. (I didn’t bother to correct for the addition because the recipe starts with 0% SF.) That batch reached a light trace within a few minutes at 90F. For comparison, previous 100% OO batches made at the same temperature but without the orange wax took 15-20 minutes to reach light trace.

As an update for the thread, the soap I made on May 24, 2019 using 3% orange wax still has a light orange scent.

 

[HowieRoll]

That's interesting! I noted that the melted oils were 127°F prior to adding the orange wax and stirring it in, so by the time the lye was added I would guess everything was in the 117-123° range (I've been soaping a little warmer due to the soy wax). Orange EO will slow trace so maybe the addition of that kept things in check? I wasn't dilly-dallying, but after emulsion able to weigh out 20% of the batter, add some TD, stir it in, stare at it, decide I needed more, stir it in, stare at it, add just a little more, stir it in... then pour 1/2 of the plain soap, 1/2 of the TD soap, then the rest of both, scrape both bowls obsessively, and do a swirl without issue.

For the smell, I think next time I would dial the orange wax back to about 5% and not add benzoin resinoid. Then I would tell myself firmly not to add orange EO, either, so I could see how the wax holds on its own, but know I would probably talk myself out of that and add it.

 

[Mobjack Bay]

I did a quick, cursory search for additional information on citral and found that it is comprised on geranial and neral (in one source, but possibly neryl? in other sources). Interestingly, it looks like these constituents are in lemongrass, palmarosa, petitgrain, geranium, and rose, for examples. There’s also a p-mentha 1,8 something constituent in orange wax that turns out to be a form of limonene. According to the New Direction chemical analysis for IFRA standards, the citral could be 1 to 10x the p-mentha. Maybe you can reimagine the doggy smell as palmarosa or geranium @HowieRoll .


ETA: Here are the 100% OO soaps I made the other day using 2% orange wax. This is the first time I used the wax for soaps made in individual cavity molds. The base recipe was Zany’s No Slime Castile, I started with my oil at 90F and the lye concentration was 37%. The flower mold soaps sat covered on a heating pad for a four hours at low before the heating pad turned itself off. The small soaps went into a prewarmed (140F) oven that was then turned off. For the larger molds, the color is quite pale compared with the yellow I’ve achieved at 3% in a loaf mold. For the smaller molds, the tops of the soaps are yellow and the bottoms, which were exposed to air, are pale. The flower sides of the flower molded soaps look like they might have a very fine coating of ash. It’s hard to tell at this stage. The sides exposed to the air have the same color, but a different sheen. The scent for this batch is a blend of lavandin (50%), litsea (10%) and patchouli (20%) used at 5% ppo and in addition to the orange wax. Right now the lavandin is strongest.

 

[HowieRoll]

I did a quick, cursory search for additional information on citral and found that it is comprised on geranial and neral (in one source, but possibly neryl? in other sources). Interestingly, it looks like these constituents are in lemongrass, palmarosa, petitgrain, geranium, and rose, for examples. There’s also a p-mentha 1,8 something constituent in orange wax that turns out to be a form of limonene. According to the New Direction chemical analysis for IFRA standards, the citral could be 1 to 10x the p-mentha. Maybe you can reimagine the doggy smell as palmarosa or geranium @HowieRoll .

Haha - yes, I will close my eyes and pretend I'm in a flower patch! I used it again last night, and while the first whiffs are overwhelmingly like wet dog, after my brain focuses on the fact it is ORANGE! ORANGE! I do definitely smell orange peel.

As for the color of yours, that is super perplexing why the colors are so different. In my (long-winded) post above I forgot to mention that I wrapped the slab mold with a towel and left it on the counter overnight. I normally CPOP, but wanted to give the orange smells in this batch the best chance of survival at their fittest. Now I wonder if the color would have morphed at all had I CPOP'd it, although at 10% orange wax it was pretty intense to begin with.

 

[Mobjack Bay]

Haha - yes, I will close my eyes and pretend I'm in a flower patch! I used it again last night, and while the first whiffs are overwhelmingly like wet dog, after my brain focuses on the fact it is ORANGE! ORANGE! I do definitely smell orange peel.

As for the color of yours, that is super perplexing why the colors are so different. In my (long-winded) post above I forgot to mention that I wrapped the slab mold with a towel and left it on the counter overnight. I normally CPOP, but wanted to give the orange smells in this batch the best chance of survival at their fittest. Now I wonder if the color would have morphed at all had I CPOP'd it, although at 10% orange wax it was pretty intense to begin with.

Looking back at one of my earlier posts, the little soap in the front is ungelled and the larger soaps in the back are gelled. The gelled soaps were from a loaf and the little one was extra batter I put in an individual mold. I still have no idea why I ended up with the blotchy discoloration in the orange wax layers, but it was probably a technique issue. In both cases the yellow is so nice, and so different from what I achieved in the recent soaps. ,aybe I should cut one of the flower soaps in half to see what’s in the middle, or scrub one with distilled water to see if the outer layer is ash hiding a beautiful yellow below.

 

[Mobjack Bay]

I’m running through my archived soaps and want to report that this little soap, which was made back in May 2019, still has a nice orange scent.

ETA: @HowieRoll @Richard Perrine can either of you provide an update on your orange wax soaps?

 

[Johnez]

I’m running through my archived soaps and want to report that this little soap, which was made back in May 2019, still has a nice orange scent.
View attachment 52947
ETA: @HowieRoll @Richard Perrine can either of you provide an update on your orange wax soaps?

This is fascinating stuff, I really wish I could find a supplier that's trustworthy and that carries orange wax. I've found Etsy and Amazon suppliers and what looks like a homemade operation online, however I would prefer a well known company to work with here to start. NDA doesn't appear to carry orange wax anymore. :-(

 

[Richard Perrine]

I do apologize. I have not been as active and missed the post. I continue to make orange soaps using the wax and the fragrance is out of this world. My only source to date is from Dr. Adorable Inc. on Amazon. I admit I have only purchased the product once. I don’t know of any reputable companies that produces a regular supply of it.