"Room temperature" method

[penelopejane]

=> I don't have a car and it's chilly autumn now where I am
=> I'll be using liquid oils anyway. I don't plan on using beeswax and I don't have access to palm oil or cocoa or shea butter. So the hardest oil I'll have will be coconut which melts at a really low temperature. I could pre melt it in a double boiler with hot tap water and add the other oils to warm them up a little and keep the coconut oil liquid.



=> a false trace is when the hard oils solidify, right? So if I don't use hard oils it should work... right?

If you get white spots in your finished soap it will be because your coconut oil wasn't hot enough when you mixed it.

 

[penelopejane]

Here are the room temp. batches I made yesterday.



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[Susie]

Please remember that skin is made up of many, many layers of dead skin cells that we naturally slough all day long. So the brief exposure of skin to a "high" (9-12) pH product will have very little long term effects. What is more of a worry, though, is "free" lye that will damage the skin. Hence the need to zap test.

 

[topofmurrayhill]

Thank you for that! I understood ph would be as high as ten but I didn't know it could be even more! I feel much better! Also I have been choosing oils and additives that were suitable for my dry self but the ph thing still gave me pause...! Plus I'm all about the superfat! I will be leaving a longer cure time, for sure. At least 6-8 weeks for cp unless it's Castile or something, and 4-6 for hot process. So far they've all felt great tho I have one that's a shade drying and another that's super soft, so I've adjusted those two and will see how that pans out next run. And thanks for the posting info, I was feeling like a dolt and getting frustrated..

Generally you don't need to worry about pH when making soap. Most people will get more mileage out of focusing on recipe formulation and good technique.

It appears to be well established that the pH of a skin cleansing product has an affect on how irritating that product can be. Lower pH is generally better, and even slightly acidic might be the best. Because of its alkalinity, soap can do more than strip oil from the skin.

However, it's not simple. A higher pH product isn't always more irritating. It depends on what's in it and what you're sensitive to. Some might do better with non-soap surfactants while other might do better to avoid them. A soap recipe could possibly be more alkaline, but not strip your skin or penetrate as much. Another might be less alkaline but perhaps it strips oils more. So pH is just one piece of the puzzle, and not the one you should usually focus on.

That said, it's common in the industry to acidify soap a bit to lower the pH and increase the fatty acids, which act as a superfat. One of the reasons well-aged soap is mild is that this acidification also happens gradually and naturally as your soap interacts with the atmosphere over time.

 

[The Efficacious Gentleman]

..........That said, it's common in the industry to acidify soap a bit to lower the pH and increase the fatty acids, which act as a superfat. One of the reasons well-aged soap is mild is that this acidification also happens gradually and naturally as your soap interacts with the atmosphere over time.

Thinking out load, if I make a soap with a 0% SF (or as far as a calc can get it) and then neutralise it down to essentially a 5% SF which would be made up of FFAs, would that be a lower pH and/or better in general than making it with a straight 5% SF? An added benefit being that the extra 5% glycerine is also now "free".

 

[topofmurrayhill]

Thinking out load, if I make a soap with a 0% SF (or as far as a calc can get it) and then neutralise it down to essentially a 5% SF which would be made up of FFAs, would that be a lower pH and/or better in general than making it with a straight 5% SF? An added benefit being that the extra 5% glycerine is also now "free".

It would definitely be a slightly lower pH and theoretically could be better than the superfatting we normally do, but there are some problems with doing that in home soapmaking -- and one in particular that I ran into.

Experiments have gone on hold for the past few weeks, which is why I haven't posted results. What I was finding out, I think, it that methods like this work in commercial soaps because they don't contain glycerin. There seems to be an interaction between fatty acid and glycerol that makes the soap soft. I believe that galaxymlp was getting similar results in her comparable experiments. She was neutralizing whereas I was directly superfatting with FFA.

I made HP coconut oil soap. 100% CO 0% discount makes a hard soap. 100% CO 20% discount makes a hard soap. 80% CO 0% discount with 20% stearic acid makes a soft soap. 90% CO 0% discount with 10% stearic acid makes a soft soap. It's interesting and maybe a bit weird.

I was planning to try this with lauric or myristic acid too, both of which are hard flakes. Haven't gotten to that but I'm not overly optimistic about getting different results.

It seems that Failor may have unwittingly been doing this with liquid soap. Everyone thinks she was intentionally making lye heavy soap. If you look at her numbers, it seems she was making LS exactly the way everyone does it, with approximately 0% lye discount, and then superfatting it by neutralizing to a lower pH.

 

[The Efficacious Gentleman]

Well that is annoying. I look forward to the full results when you have the time for it, as it sounds jolly interesting