Soaping 101 liquid soapmaking video?

[Susie]

Congratulations on making liquid soap!

Wait to see what you get tomorrow before worrying. If you did indeed follow the recipe on the Soaping 101 video, it will turn out watery, as that is the nature of that particular recipe. It is not the end of the world, however, as it is perfect for a foamer bottle, and it still cleans fine.

If you simply must try to thicken it, I would indeed make another batch, and add around 2 oz paste to your diluted soap until they stop melting. Then just make a note of how much paste it took to how much water to figure out what you should do in the future. Each batch is different. You will learn from experience where to start out adding dilution water based on the ingredients.

Keep good notes on every batch! This will prove an invaluable resource in the future! Next time you go to make the same thing, you will then see that it did not go through all the stages, and it took only X amount of water to dilute Y amount of paste.

Most home made liquid soaps tend to be on the watery side. Some soapers have perfected recipes using sodium lactate and other ingredients that come out as thick as commercial products. Use the search option to locate them.

 

[shaan]

That was very helpful.. thanks a lot! I dont want to send the pics,its all water.looking like mud water with foam. :-(

 

[shaan]

Its lathering quite well,little bit drying..can i use it right away or is it necessary to wait for 2 weeks? Can i use it to wash my hair?

 

[Susie]

It is fine to use now. The 2 weeks wait time is to allow any particles to settle to the bottom. I have yet to have any particles in mine.

You can use it for whatever you like. I tried it for shampoo. Was not impressed, but it certainly did not hurt my hair.
I prefer shampoo bars now that I have made those.

 

[shaan]

Hey this is how it looks at present.. one day old..now what?is it fine?what is the white part above the kind of transparent liquid? Should i just leave it for two weeks?

 

[Ellacho]

Yay! I'm so glad to hear things turned out great! I knew that they would, but it's great to hear it all the same. I've found the glycerin method to be so forgiving (as you yourself just found out). It's so simple that I just can't see myself making liquid soap any other way.

I'm not surprised at all to hear that you made 2 more batches. Once you get one successful batch under your belt, it's very hard not to want to make gobs and gobs more (at least for me)! lol


IrishLass

Hi IrishLass, I tried your recipe and your method of making glycerin liquid soap. I am not sure what went wrong but my glycerin/lye turned into a thick white paste when I boiled them together.... I heated glycerin/lye to over 200 degrees for 20+ minutes but they never turned into crystal clear. It was like more white frosting...sigh...

Nevertheless, I poured the mixture to heated oils. It did not turned into crystal clear color like I've seen it on Carrie Peterson's Youtube but it's more like amber or tan color...:-( It's probably something to do with the frosting mixture).

It's my first time making glycerin liquid soap, so any advice will be greatly appreciated. Thank you!!


Here's my recipe:

65% Olive Oil
25% Ex Virgin Coconut Oil
10% Castor Oil

SF @ 3% - using Soapcalc. Checked KOH is 90% pure

I used AAA KOH(90%)

BTW, it's cooking in my crock pot. I will be turning it off in one hour and go to bed :-?.

 

[Susie]

Hey this is how it looks at present.. one day old..now what?is it fine?what is the white part above the kind of transparent liquid? Should i just leave it for two weeks?

I am sorry I missed you asking about the white part until now. I have no idea why I missed it.

At any rate, the white part is probably either foam, undissolved soap paste, or superfatting. You will have to test to see what it is. If it is foam, spray with alcohol, and it should die down rapidly. If it is undissolved soap paste, just remove it from the liquid, and mix with more water. If it is superfatting, you can just remove it by pouring into a gravy separator cup that allows you to pour the bottom off first. You may have to let it sit a bit before pouring. Hope that helps!

 

[IrishLass]

Ellacho, I have a very good idea of why your KOH/glycerin turned into a thick, white paste while boiling/dissolving.....

Both Carrie Peterson and myself use SummerbeeMeadow's advanced lye calculator instead of SoapCalc when calculating our KOH and glycerin amounts for our glycerin liquid soap. If you type your recipe into both of the calculators and then compare the results of how much water (or glycerin) they each give you to use for your batch, you'll notice that Summerbee gives you a much higher amount to use than SoapCalc.

I just typed the recipe into both calculators set for a 1 lb batch superfatted at 3%, and I clicked on the 90% purity & KOH buttons on SoapCalc. Summerbee does not have a 90% purity button to click on since the purity is already figured into their advanced calculator by default (they were pioneers in the practice of taking the purity of KOH into consideration and they built the purity factor into their advanced calculator by default years before SoapCalc woke up to it and began making available their 90% option button.) Anyway, this is what I got:

SummerbeeMeadow's calls for 3.4 oz./96g KOH (with purity already taken into account by default) and 10.19 oz./ 288.8g water (or glycerin), which turns out to be about a 25% lye solution by default (which they believe is the best lye solution level for making liquid soaps).

SoapCalc calls for 3.5 oz./100.5g KOH at 90% purity and 6 oz./172g water (or glycerin), which is about a 34% lye solution.

See the huge difference in water (or glycerin) amounts? Carrie and I both use about 4 more ounces of glycerin in ours than what SoapCalc calls for. That is why ours dissolves in about 5 to 10 minutes and turns out crystal clear and why yours became pasty and took so long/was troublesome to dissolve.

Next time, I would either use Summerbee's advanced calculator, or else set the lye concentration on SoapCalc to around 25%.

HTH!
IrishLass

 

[Susie]

I use SBM Advanced for liquid soap also. I just like the outcomes better. Thank you, IrishLass for defining why! I don't think I ever took the time to figure it out.

 

[Ellacho]

Hi IrishLass!!

Thank you so much for your quick response! Ah~ It makes sense now! You are right, my soap paste is lye heavy(see the picture). This morning, I checked my crock pot and my soap paste was as hard as taffy candy. I should've used Summerbee's advanced calculator ....for next batch, I will definitely use it.


Now...what will be the best way to save this soap paste? Should I add extra glycerin back into the pot and cook some more?

Please help! Thank you so much IrishLass !

 

[Susie]

How long was that cooked for? Less liquid(water or glycerin) does not make it lye heavy, it just makes it harden faster. That lye heavy will need either more cooking(if not cooked long enough) or more oil to balance out the lye heaviness.

(I am not really trying to hijack IrishLass answering, I just think that she is going to need to know a bit more of the method thus far.)(And I am nosy.)

 

[Ellacho]

How long was that cooked for? Less liquid(water or glycerin) does not make it lye heavy, it just makes it harden faster. That lye heavy will need either more cooking(if not cooked long enough) or more oil to balance out the lye heaviness.

(I am not really trying to hijack IrishLass answering, I just think that she is going to need to know a bit more of the method thus far.)(And I am nosy.)

Hi Susie,
Thank you for your response to my inquiry! That's right! What am I thinking? DUH... My recipe was not lye heavy in first place...It was just a matter of color not being clear.

The crock pot was turned off after I cooked it for 1 1/2 hours later. I did not cook it enough - right? The average LS cooking time is around 3 - 4 hours, but I could be wrong.

Ok...I am going to cook it more now.... But then, I do need some sort of assurance from LS experienced soapers. Is it all I have to do :??

Thank you again for your help!

 

[KatieShephard]

Totally subbing to this thread! IrishLass's recipes are officially added to my "to make" list

 

[Susie]

Hi Susie,
Thank you for your response to my inquiry! That's right! What am I thinking? DUH... My recipe was not lye heavy in first place...It was just a matter of color not being clear.

The crock pot was turned off after I cooked it for 1 1/2 hours later. I did not cook it enough - right? The average LS cooking time is around 3 - 4 hours, but I could be wrong.

Ok...I am going to cook it more now.... But then, I do need some sort of assurance from LS experienced soapers. Is it all I have to do :??

Thank you again for your help!

I am the wrong person to ask. I am the CP LS gal. I just hate to cook and stir that paste.

But, if the problem was that it hardened too fast, I would add the remainder of what was missing from the recipe. IrishLass showed that you had about 4 ounces too little liquid. Add that and cook another hour before pheno testing again. When it tests clear on top of the paste,(not the paper towel), you are done. Just start dilution.

 

[IrishLass]

Ellacho- could you give me a brief breakdown of what you did?

Here's what I have so far. Please correct me if I am wrong, or fill in the blanks where needed.

1. You mixed the KOH with too little glycerin and cooked for 20+ minutes and ended up with a thick/pasty white lye solution instead of a liquidy clear solution.

2. You then poured the thick pasty solution into your heated oils.

3. You cooked the mixture for 1 1/2 hours in your crockpot before turning the crockpot off and going to bed.

4. Presently, you want to know if you should cook it some more.

How did I do?

Well, first thing- one of the really cool things about the glycerin method is that you don't actually need to cook it to the paste stage. I never cook mine and it saponifies to the paste stage all on its own just fine between 1 to 6 hours (depending on the formula).

Here's a brief rundown of what I do: Once my KOH/glycerin solution is mixed in with my heated oils, I just stir the mixture with a whisk until I see tiny bubbles flying up from out of my pot and floating in the air around my head (which takes all of 10 minutes, normally). That's a sign that the mixture has saponified enough to become soap, but the mixture is still quite liquidy and harsh/zappy at this point, and so I just cover it and leave it alone (off heat) to finish doing its thing - i.e., to finish saponifying into firm, tongue-neutral taffy-like paste all by itself with no interference from me. Like I said, this can take anywhere from 1 hour to 6 hours depending on the formula, and sometimes if I'm lazy I'll just leave it overnight to do it's thing.

Once it has become firm, taffy-like paste and tests out tongue-neutral, it is ready for dilution.

How does your paste check out? Is it tongue-neutral? If so, you can dilute it any time now (or later at a more convenient time. The paste will wait patiently for you until you are ready). If it's not tongue-neutral, just cover it and let it sit for longer (no need to cook it to neutrality).

If it's tongue-neutral, this is how I would go about it if I was diluting your extra-thick paste that's scant on the glycerin:

First, I would add back the missing difference in glycerin (between SoapCalc and Summerbee) to the extra thick paste in your crockpot and start heating it up (while occassionally stirring as the soap paste softens/melts from the heat). Once the paste is melty and the glycerin is mixed in well, then I would weigh it and then I would start adding the dilution water. For this particular recipe, I like to use a ratio of 1 part paste to .75 parts water for a nice, pourable, honey-like consistency (just multiply the weight of the melty paste/glycerin mixture by .75 or 75% to get the amount of dilution water to add). You can add more water if you like it thinner, but start with .75 parts water first, and proceed (a tiny bit at a time) from there until you get the consistency you like (less is more where the glycerin method is concerned).

Let me know how it goes and/or if you need more help!

IrishLass

 

[Susie]

*Whew*

Saved by IrishLass!

By the way, got the cast off today...guess what I am making tomorrow?

 

[Ellacho]

Oh!! Hi IrishLass ! Thank you for responding my question. Sorry... I will give you a brief breakdown of what I did as soon as I pick up daughter from school! Talk to you soon! Thank you!!

 

[Ellacho]

Hi IrishLass,

OMG! You are awesome ! You did well!! Yes, 1-4 are all correct!

My paste has been in the pot since last night(that's almost 24 hours now). I just checked my paste and to my surprise, it is tongue-neutral even though its phenol test result is still dark pink. Can this happen? Hmm...May be I don't know how to do a zap test.

I will put the missing difference in glycerin back into the pot and let it cook. Keep it in the pot over night. Then, dilute it tomorrow. Whew~~I got it, right?

I cannot thank you enough for taking your precious time responding back to me such way I can understand how to finish up making glycerin LS soap. What a relief!!

Thank you again!

 

[DeeAnna]

And so goes another lesson in the Zen of No-Drama Liquid Soapmaking by Susie and Irish Lass. Applause!

 

[IrishLass]

I'm so glad to be able to help out!

My paste has been in the pot since last night(that's almost 24 hours now). I just checked my paste and to my surprise, it is tough-neutral even though its phenol test result is still dark pink. Can this happen? Hmm...May be I don't know how to do a zap test.

Depending on how you conducted the phenol test, I think I just might trust in an inexperienced tongue more than I do in the color of the phenolphthalein that you are getting, especially since phenol turns pink in the presence of alkalinity- and since soap is alkaline, interpreting the color can be tricky at best. I know that Carrie uses the tissue smear method with the phenol (and it looks from you picture that you did, too?), but from all I've read about phenolphthalein, it only works in solution, i.e., for it to be able to work properly, one needs to make a 1% solution out of the soap by mixing 1 gram of soap into 99 grams of water first before testing it with a 1% phenol/ethanol solution.

If you ask me- I'd go with what your tongue is telling you, especially since you seem to have weighed and calculated everything out correctly, and the paste is now over 24 hours old, but then again, I must confess that I'm partial to the tongue test. It's my go-to testing method of choice.

To conduct- just rub a little of your paste between 2 fingers under some running water to get some suds going, and then touch the tip of your tongue to the suds. If there's still unreacted lye in it, your tongue will feel it as a tingly or biting sensation- almost as if the soap decided to nip or bite you back for being so rude as to stick your tongue to it. lol It's not unlike the feeling you would get by putting a drop of hot sauce on the tip of your tongue, or stuck your tongue to the terminal of a 9-volt battery (the small ones, not the really large kind). A good way to know if you are interpreting the tongue test correctly is to get a bar of store-bought soap (which should be tongue-neutral) and use it as a control subject with which to compare.


IrishLass