Replacing PS80 with sulfated castor oil

Nao · May 31, 2017

I was reading the thread with Irish Lass's cacao/shea butter liquid soap yesterday and the recipe calls for PS80 which I don't have. But I do have sulfated castor oil.

So I wonder if they are to any degree interchangeable in this particular recipe and/or in general. From what little I have read about the two they seem to be but I can't be sure.

Irish Lass's cacao/Shea butter liquid soap:
http://www.soapmakingforum.com/showthread.php?t=57974&highlight=liquid+soap+tutorial

Dahila · May 31, 2017

I tried to replace Poly 20 in spray and for 10 g of EO I needed 25 g of Sulfated Castro oil. No way, with such high number the spray was gross
Probably it will not work, SCO does not emulsify like Poly 80 does

DeeAnna · May 31, 2017

PS 80 is a solubilizer/emulsifier/surfactant. I know sulfated castor oil is soluble in water, but I've never heard that it is a solubilizer/emulsifier. I don't have personal experience with it, however.

IrishLass · May 31, 2017

From what I understand, sulfated castor oil (also known as turkey red oil because of its reddish color) is not an emulsifier. It's just a water-soluble oil that was originally formulated for use in the textile industries, but soapers found that it could be also used as a super-fatting oil in liquid soap made using Catherine Failor's recipes (which call for large, up-front lye excesses). Since it's water soluble, it mixes right into the diluted soap, and it doesn't cause any cloudiness.

I considered buying some when I first started making liquid soap, but decided against it when I kept running into posts complaining of its underlying peculiar smell, which many find to be rather unpleasant.

IrishLass

earlene · May 31, 2017

I have use sulfated castor oil AKA Red Turkey Oil, and it was in a recipe that also used PS80.

From what I read, PS80 is a nonionic surfactant and Red Turkey Oil (sulfated castor oil) is an anionic surfactant. From what I've read, the form of a surfactant does have something to do with what they do and how they perform in cleaning, so I would guess they are not totally interchangeable. (This article talks a bit about that in relation to cleaning.)

Here are a couple of articles about sulfated castor oil (Red Turkey Oil) that I found helpful, but they don't really address your question specifically:

http://www.castoroil.in/castor/cast...sulfated_castor_oil_sulfonated_castoroil.html

http://edgewatersoaps.blogspot.com/2010/01/scientific-soapmaking-sulfated-castor.html

The latter has some detail about what Kevin Dunn had to say about the oil (toward the end of the article.)

Anyway, if I were making that recipe, I'd wait until I had some PS80.

But, I also found something here that suggests what you read, too and that perhaps is could be used to help emulsify other oils. I don't really know and think it is worth experimenting with. But I don't know that I'd want to risk wasting good cocoa butter and shea butter for an experiment.

Perhaps you might try a little experiment with a small sample and see if it really does a decent job of solubilizing another oil first and decide from there.