New to soap making and about to give it a go with a batch listed in my soap calc. Would greatly appreciate some thoughts and/or suggestions on how to improve this recipe. My concern here is that it may be too soft, however I can't seem to get around it with the ingredients listed, as I'm trying to keep it cost effective and simple for the first batches. I've also set the lye concentration to 30%. Any tips on how to make this a harder bar without increasing the cleansing factor? Would you guys recommend increasing the lye concentration to 33% for shortened cure time? Thanks!
Hi there, welcome to the forum!
I assume this is for cold process, right?
Yes, you can definitely increase the lye concentration a little bit - you can go for 33% for your first try, once you get more comfortable working with lye you can go for 35%, even 40 ‐ as long as you don't go for fancy swirls and designs and you don't need the batter to be watery for longer. You'll eventually figure out what you like and how to do it, but it's good that you want to keep it relatively simple for now. Just to mention - less water doesn't affect the hardness of the final, fully cured bar, but it helps it get to that final hardness a little quicker. You will still need at least 4 weeks before the soap is good to use.
Superfat can also affect hardness, and you should keep in mind it's not mentioned with the results at the end of the page in soap calc. You can play around with the SF % and everything below (hardness, conditioning, etc.) will stay the same in the calculations - however, that's not true. More SF makes a softer bar, less SF makes a harder one. 5% is a great starting point, just as your recipe shows. Once you are more familiar with soap making and you feel more comfortable adjusting all the variables in your recipes, you can play around with that as well - you may want to increase it to get a more gentle bar or you can decrease it to get a harder one, with less chance for DOS. But for your first time, 5% is great!
I can see there's no palm oil in your recipe, and it's (at least where I'm at) the cheapest fat you can buy. If you want to increase the hardness of your soap, I would suggest getting palm oil, or lard, or tallow (in case you don't avoid those oils intentionally, which I would understand). Those 3 mentioned make a great bar combined with coconut and olive. So what I would suggest to change is this:
1. Drop the castor to 5% (many people say they feel when it's high and they don't like it - I haven't personally noticed anything wrong with a 10% castor bar but I don't usually use much liquid fats). Also, that much castor will accelerate trace.
2. Drop the avocado to 10% (where I'm from, it's expensive and I wouldn't use much of it in a CP recipe). Of course, it may not be the case for you - but you will still benefit from clearing some space for solid fats.
3. Drop the olive to 23%. I don't know if this one is expensive where you are (I use pomace which is the cheapest), but either way, we'll clear more way for solid oils.
Now, we cleared 25% liquid fats - add 25% palm oil instead (or lard/tallow) and you have a balanced recipe with enough solid fats which is still not hard to work with and is not a bad first recipe. Of course, if you don't mind using those fats and you can find them near you at an affordable price.
Or, you can always make it even more simple by making it with 3 oils only: 33% palm, 33% coconut and 34% olive. It's a recipe that stood the test of time as a great first timer - it was the first soap I made and it was a pretty good soap! Yes, for some people 33% coconut will be too cleansing, but I never found any problem with high coconut soap - just experiment, that's the beauty of it! You may like the result.
Of course, you can also keep the recipe as it is, and it will be a good soap as well - as long as you follow the procedure when making it. With lots of liquid oils you will have plenty of time to work on it and observe the process. Slow trace is good for your first time (10% castor may be a problem though, consider dropping it to 5 in any case), because there's smaller chance of something surprising you and a state of panic coming in - we want to avoid that!
So don't worry, everything will be fine, no matter what you choose to make. I like the fact that you didn't find some recipe online and tried to replicate it - instead, you created your own recipe from scratch and you are taking your time learning what all those numbers mean, I respect that! Just so you know - some people make soap for years and still don't know what the qualities on soap calc mean exactly (which is not a bad thing per se) - but it's always inspiring to see someone new who takes it so seriously and spends a lot of time learning theory instead of jumping straight to practice.
Good luck and let us know how your first adventure in the soaping world turns out!
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