Soap Recipie critique

[Cherbearthere]

Olive oil 10 oz
Coconut Oil 12.5 oz
Castor 8 oz
Shea butter 4oz
Canola .5 oz

11.3 oz Water
5.3 Lye

What do you all think a good recipie????

 

[Loolee]

It should be a nice hard bar. But your high coconut oil is going to make a very cleansing bar of soap. I think that some would consider it drying because of that.

I think you really don't need the castor oil at all.

 

[Genny]

That recipe is a little high on cleansing (24) for my skin. Personally, I'd switch the amounts of olive & coconut. 22% castor is going to make a very soft soap, so I'd lower that to around 5-10%. Maybe up the canola & shea a little to compensate for lowering the castor. But not too much, because too much canola can cause dos and too much shea can accelerate trace.

 

[IrishLass]

Your amount of 5.3 oz for lye is showing me you forgot to enter in a superfat (I entered your recipe into SoapCalc and I come up with a negative 1 superfat for 5.3 oz lye). I would enter in a 5% superfat so that your soap does not come out lye heavy. Your water amount is fine, though.

As for the rest of your formula...

That's a lot of castor oil for the type of formula that you have there. SoapCalc shows me 22% worth of castor. That much castor would be fine in a much harder bar with more solid fats, but in your particular formula with 52.86% combined soft oils, you may find that your finished soap feels somewhat on the soft and sticky side. If it were me, I would drop the castor to 10% of your formula or below.

If your skin tends towards the normal to dry type (like mine), you may find your formula to be somewhat drying. At least I know that I would....... unless you compensated with a higher superfat of at least 8 or more. But that's just me. Oilier skin types might be fine with it.

For what it is worth, if I were to re-write the formula to customize it to my own normal-to-dry skin-type, this is what I'd end up trying:

Olive oil 12.6 oz (36%)
Coconut Oil 11.2 oz (32%)
Castor Oil 3.5 oz (10%)
Shea Butter 5.95 oz (17%)
Canola Oil 1.75 oz (5%)

Water: 10.5 oz
Lye: 4.7 oz (8% superfat)


IrishLass

 

[new12soap]

I agree with all the above, that much coconut oil would be too drying for me, and that much castor will make a soft sticky bar, but I do love and use both! I would totally dump the canola, but that's just me. I would be more inclined to try something like this

Olive Oil 50%
Coconut Oil 25%
Shea Butter 18%
Castor Oil 7%

BUT, having said all that, a big part of the fun and what we learn most from is experimenting! So give yours a try and see how you like it, then you can make adjustments accordingly