reverse engineering this bar soap?

[lighthouseAtSea]

hello! new to this forum, and soapmaking in general.

there's this soap i enjoy a lot, and my intent on figuring out how it's made isn't because i want to resell it or anything. I've so far only made 3 batches of my own soap, all done with tallow. my roommate's dog always tries to eat it, so i guess it's good?

anyway, I've been trying to experiment and figure out how to make other soaps without tallow, but I'm still new to all the maths and percentages involved. i have a learning disability with numbers, so I'm a lot slower on the uptake.

if anyone can give me a hand on trying to figure this one out, I'd really appreciate it! i want to try making something new, just to see if i can. thank you!!

the ingredients listed: Hydrogenated Soybean (Glycine Soja) Oil, Canola (Rapeseed) Oil, Goat Milk, Olive (Olea Europaea) Oil, Castor (Rincinis Communis) Oil, Beeswax (Cera Alba), Sea Salt (Sodium Chloride), Walnut (Juglans Regia) Powder, Fragrance (cassia, vanilla, mimosa, patchouli, bergamot)

 

[AliOop]

Hi there, and welcome to the forum and to soapmaking!

First, I would recommend learning how to use a soap calculator. This is key to making good recipes and avoiding errors in the process. A lot of folks use the free Soapcalc.net, and there are plenty of good tutorials for that on YouTube, like this one. I greatly prefer SoapmakingFriend, but it works best if you pay for a subscription rather than using the very limited free version, and I haven't found any good tutorials for it yet.

I'm actually very comfortable with math concepts, but tend to make mistakes (mostly transposition errors) when performing the calculations. The soap calculator helps me avoid those mistakes by handling the calculations for me. It also allows me to use percentages to create a recipe, which the calculator then translates into weights (oz or grams at my preference), depending on what size of recipe I tell it that I want to make.

Second, when reverse engineering a soap, we assume that they have listed the ingredients in descending order. However, this label apparently left out the NaOH (sodium hydroxide, aka lye), so that already gives me pause. Leaving out a required ingredient like lye makes me wonder if their ingredients are listed in descending order, or just whatever order they happened to write down, or whether these are even all the oils that they used.

Can you describe what it is that you like about this bar? Is it the scent, the type of lather, the scrubbiness of it, or something else?

I ask because honestly, this is quite an odd recipe. With both goat milk and beeswax, it also not an easy recipe for a beginner, as both of those ingredients can be tricky to work with. More importantly, with no oils that create bubbles (coconut oil, palm kernel oil, or babassu oil), this is likely to need a long cure and will have a lather that is more like a creamy lotion, rather than fluffy bubbles, and somewhat scrubby from the walnut powder. Does that describe your experience with using this bar?

If so, and if that's what you want to create, here is my best stab at it:

35% soy wax (hydrogenated soybean oil)
30% canola oil (use high oleic or high heat canola oil or this soap will go bad quickly)
29% olive oil
5% castor oil
1% beeswax

Salt at 2% of total oil weight; this is dissolved in the liquid before adding the NaOH.

Walnut powder at 2% of total oil weight; this is probably stirred into the mix at light to medium trace.

Fragrance at 3-6% of total oil weight. Without smelling the bar, it's hard to know the proportions of each essential oil, fragrance oil, or absolute that was used to create the blend. That would require some experimentation on your part.

I'd use a 33% lye concentration, 3% superfat, and goat milk to replace the water. However, making goat milk soap is somewhat of an advanced technique. It's probably easiest to use plain water for making your lye solution, and add goat milk powder at 2-3% of oil weight. You can pre-moisten the goat milk by either mixing it into your fragrance blend, or just blend it dry into your oils.

Again, this is quite an odd recipe, and not beginner friendly at all. But if you give it a go, please let us know how it turns out! Alternatively, once we know what you like about this bar, we can probably suggest something simpler that still matches the qualities that you like about this one, or at least, comes close.

 

[akseattle]

@lighthouseAtSea ,
Is your tallow soap 100% tallow? If so, it's probably very creamy, nice and hard, but not to bubbly. Can I ask why you have been making tallow soap up until now but now want something different?

So, I'm wondering the same thing @AliOop asked, what is it that you like about this new bar that you would like to reverse engineer?
I'm a relative beginner and one of the best tips I got on this forum after making my first soap and thinking I'd totally blown it was to try to conquer the basics before branching out too much. Although it was suggested I try working with no colorants and no fragrance, that ship had sailed. But, I did end up picking SoapQueen's Lots of Lather recipe because she said itwas tried and true. But, after reading about the characteristics of different oils and what they do, I started to slow tweak it to have more of what I wanted. The second tip that i have taken to heart is to ALWAYS run your recipe through a soapcalculator. Even if you get a tried and true, highly recommended recipe on line, ALWAYS run it through a soapcalculator.

I use SoapCalc at http://soapcalc.net/calc/SoapCalcWP.asp . It is free of charge, easy to use ( it has an explanation for how to use it on there).
You don't have to actually understand its inner workings to use it. But right away, you can look at the little chart it produces which tells you what qualities the mystery soap you are making will have. (Well, except that there are exceptions..... )

If you LIKE using tallow, but you want to improve it so that it has some of the qualities you like about your mystery soap, maybe start by using tallow, but adding some of the other oils in your mystery soap (I would definitely add castor oil in 5% as suggested by @AliOop . If your mystery soap is brownish, I assume the walnut powder was used as a colorant? So, you could keep your colorant and the fragrances in your mystery soap, too.

Below is an article on the Lovely Greens website on how to improve a tallow soap. She has a really nice writing style with lots of pictures, so really easy to absorb what she's saying.
https://lovelygreens.com/simple-tal...w soap recipes are,recipe that uses olive oil.

I would also suggest reading a section out of @DeeAnna 's Classic Bells site on what soapcalc number really mean. The link is:
https://classicbells.com/soap/soapCalcNumbers.asp

As a warning, @DeeAnna has a chemistry background, and I believe teaches, so her writing is a little more technical and she packs in alot of information. I had to read her article many times over a period of months before I could even start to remember what I read. But, it has been SUPER helpful to me in understanding soap properties so that I can get a balanced bar with the qualities that I like.

So, I'm not trying to discourage you from trying to reverse engineer your mystery soap. But, if you like tallow in your soap (I personally like tallow, lard and/ or a combination of the two between 39% and 45% in my soaps - I'm still experimenting), you could consider keeping a good amount of tallow (or even as little as 1/4 tallow) but adding some of those other oils in that bar you are reverse engineering. Run it through soapcalc and see what it says about the bars qualities. If what you see matches what you think you like in that bar you like, then try the recipe. if that mystery soap is brownish,

So, if it's not that you don't want ANY tallow, but you just want to try some new ingredients, this might be a safer approach than to just guess at what % of each named oil is in your mystery bar.

But, I can be kind of a gutless chicken. If you are adventuresome, like a challenge, and you don't mind a fail or two, free to ignore what I just said !!
Let us know what recipe you decide and that then definitely tell us how it turns out! Can't wait!!