Hi
@fnddoctor … WELCOME!
I’m new at this too! I can’t give much in the way of soap making advice — there are loads of very talented people who can give you that help.
I just wanted to encourage you
Be patient about collecting a good stash of ingredients. It can be a pricey passion — ingredients like cocoa, shea and mango butters are so expensive here in Pakistan, where I am based (taxes!!), never mind olive oil… so I get your difficulties.
My son and I practised a lot with 100% coconut oil soap (25% superfat) using Elly’s Everyday Soap Recipes (she is on YouTube and has a lovely, soothing manner about her). It’s a forgiving sort of soap and helped us gain confidence before trying more expensive ingredients.
Elly has also made a 100% rice bran oil soap as a substitute for olive castile soap. I don’t like all olive oil soaps, so I’ve not tried this. Maybe you can try it?
I think you are giving yourself less credit than you deserve - you are already trying different stuff and it works well! I'd say anyone can learn something from anyone
I really like Elly's videos and I decided to check on that specific one, with the 100% rice bran soap. And I wanted to point out 3 things I noticed, which I think are important. And here's the link for those interested:
1. She said that rice bran and olive oil have pretty close profiles. While the SAP values are close and substituting one for the other while using the same amount of NaOH won't produce that visible of a difference (don't forget those are estimates after all, having enough SF should give you enough safety margin in most cases), their fatty acid profiles are actually quite different - rice bran has around 3 times more linoleic/linolenic combined than olive oil (again, those are hypothetical estimates, depending on when you get your oils from they can differ a lot even from batch to batch). If you typed in a recipe with 100% rice bran in the calculator it would say the overall combined linoleic/linolenic content would be 36. For comparison - most soapers limit that number to 15, while I limit it to only 10. Again, it depends on where you got your rice bran from and what its actual fatty acid profile is, but if it's close to the theoretical one in the calculator - with that much of it you'll get DOS. And she didn't add anything to her soap aside from the EO (I mean any additives that can help in preventing DOS and prolonging the soap's life). If you have access to rice bran oil that has a fatty acid profile closer to that of high oleic sunflower oil or high oleic canola oil - go for it, a Castile soap will work well - but otherwise I would say, don't do it and keep its % in your recipe to a minimum. While it's still a better choice than regular sunflower oil when it comes to soaping, it's far from the best one, IMO.
2. She used filtered tap water in her recipe - which is fine, if the water she has is soft. If you have hard water, I'd say use distilled/deionized water (whatever you have access to) instead. When I first started making soap, I used filtered tap water. I have hard tap water, which gave me DOS for almost all the batches I made that way. If no additives are used, in addition to the idea of a 100% rice bran soap and the possibility of hard water, that spells unavoidable disaster.
3. Near the end of the video she tested the soap with pH strips, which won't tell you much even if done properly. And rubbing wet fingers on the soap's surface and putting a strip on it to soak some of the liquid is not the proper way.
With that being said, anyone can try anything - what works for me may not work for the others, and vice versa. We learn from our mistakes after all. I just thought the video would be a good topic for discussion and I'm curios what the others may think of the batch that was made in it