Test results

[Sapo]

If anyone is interested:

Pics:

1. Whole bunch (left to right: Bronner's pump LS and LS, water, sugar, more sugar, 4x glycerin).

2. Glycerin batches. Probably the clearest, water comes close, but used slightly different olive oil.

3. Sugar batches. Cloudy mofos, more sugar means more cloud.

4. Water batch+Dr. Bronner's (normal LS and pump LS). The jar looks cloudier than it is in real life. Apart from being darker, it doesn't appear to be less clear than B's. The clarity is more observable on the first picture with all the soap.

5. Pastes. "More sugar" paste (mid) is a **** brick.

Quick info: None of my batches feel as "luxurious" as Dr. B. soaps do. Upon applying and rubbing hands together, mine feel thin and produce craptastic lather in comparisson. Overall, the water based LS comes closest.

More info in the PDF file (located at the very bottom under the pics). It is incomplete with missing data.

Conclusions:

1. The massive price jump of GLS is not justified by any meaningful gains over a water-based LS. There are indeed even some downsides, lather is lessened. The need for cooking may be skipped by dumping in some paste to hasten "time to paste" and saponification.
2. Sugar as a substitute for glycerin is a big no-no.
3.The formulation itself is probably the reason why it fails in comparisson with Dr. B. (on factors such as lather and feel). Their CO percentage is higher and more oils are used, some of which they claim have a great effect on the soap (jojoba, hemp).

View attachment soap charts.pdf

 

[topofmurrayhill]

Cool, thanks! I'll take a close look at this tonight.

 

[McMomWV]

Very interested. Thank you so much for sharing your results. I actually have a batch of liquid soap diluting right now. I made a basic olive, castor, and coconut oil batch with half water half glycerin. Always interesting to hear other's observations and methods.

 

[Sapo]

Another observation:

Hot vs cold dilution

Equal amounts of water (110g water per 100g paste), same 100% CO paste. The clearer jar on the left is via heat, the right one is about 12h in via cold. Apparently certain substances in the concoction require heat to fully emulsify and clear up. Invisible on the camera but visible IRL, there are also some oily streaks floating about in the cold diluted jar.

Picture 2 is glycerin liquid soap. The left is cold (1:1 water : paste), the right (0.8:1) is hot. The difference is less apparent there, probably due to glyc acting as a solvent, but some differences can still be viewed.

 

[ngian]

Interesting work Sapo regarding glycerin compared to sugar, but I think that it is not fair to compare your recipes with Bronner's LS. They are totally different recipes and I think that Jojoba (a mainly wax liquid) is the main reason that the LS has a different feeling while washing your hands.

Dunn has reported that Jojoba has almost half its part with unsaponifiables that is the same with cetyl alcohol. It is somehow similar to palmitic acid in a molecular level and it tends to give duration to soap's lather (and probably nice texture/feeling).
Cetyl alcohol is one of my next experiments in both NaOH and KOH soaps.

 

[Sapo]

Any idea if unsaponifiables translate to clarity issues/unemulsified substances that tend to precipitate out of solution? Just wondering because..if it does...

Failor (approximate citation ):

"commercial liquid soap makers refrigerate their LS to force precipitation, then they remove the unemulsified substances via filtering. This process cannot be recreated at home, so we sequester to achieve similar (but not quite as effective) results."

As a test to prove this statement, I refrigerated Bronner's to see if it would cloud. It did not, not one bit - which leads me to believe that Failor is completely correct, and if these same substances are unsaponifiables, whatever jojoba might have, it's gone by the time it reaches my hands. As control I refrigerated my soaps along with it, all of which turned creamy white.

This is entirely theoretical as I don't know, but I am curious. Entire theory falls apart if unsaponifiables are not removed by their filtering process.