ResolvableOwl
Notorious Lyear
Some time ago, for a bar soap, I combined (what I thought) soft/slow oils and lye, just to see how it would go to thick trace within the first second of stick-blending. Hrm. Time to find out if some of my oils misbehave (by chance, they were all newly purchased/opened).
So I went on, grabbed some PP test tubes with lid, weighted 10 g of each oil, and added the appropriate amount of 25% KOH solution (9–12 g, zero superfat). Repeated short, vigorous shaking with rest times in between, until emulsification/trace/saponification takes off. I'm wondering if this wouldn't be a good way to quantify these fishy “fast/slow-tracing” properties of oils in a more reliable, quantitative way than just gut feel?
The candidates under observation: Sesame, HO sunflower, castor oil. I extended the test to some other oils that I happened to have around, so I did the same with babaçu, mango butter, and unrefined fLaxseed oil (with two drops of ROE).
I weighed the oils into the test tubes, tempered all to 40°C in a water bath (to melt up the solid oils), and carefully dripped in the lye, without mixing at first.
After the first shake, not much happened, except that the lye and oils became turbid (most with S, L and B). 10 minutes later, second shaking. Some trends begin to stand out. The “quicker” oils (those to come to unstable emulsion first) were surprisingly S and L; B and C were a bit more hesitant. M and O behaved indifferently.
A few shake-stand cycles later, things approached their more expected order, i. e. the B and M thickened up considerably, while the liquid oils were hard to convince to stay in stable emulsion. C made it a few hours later, the edible oils needed to stand overnight.
The other day, all batches have more or less saponified into a gelatinous goo. I diluted each with 250%TOM water. O, S became a snotty oleic slime. C and M hardened up to a point where I had to stir in the extra water. B was solid at first too, but easily dissolved in the extra liquid. L has turned syrupy. After a bit more of shaking/standing/heat bath, M absorbed the extra water to become a paste like solid honey. C dissolved completely into a clear, runny solution. B stayed liquid too, but some turbidity remained (for now).
In any case, it is
So I went on, grabbed some PP test tubes with lid, weighted 10 g of each oil, and added the appropriate amount of 25% KOH solution (9–12 g, zero superfat). Repeated short, vigorous shaking with rest times in between, until emulsification/trace/saponification takes off. I'm wondering if this wouldn't be a good way to quantify these fishy “fast/slow-tracing” properties of oils in a more reliable, quantitative way than just gut feel?
The candidates under observation: Sesame, HO sunflower, castor oil. I extended the test to some other oils that I happened to have around, so I did the same with babaçu, mango butter, and unrefined fLaxseed oil (with two drops of ROE).
I weighed the oils into the test tubes, tempered all to 40°C in a water bath (to melt up the solid oils), and carefully dripped in the lye, without mixing at first.
After the first shake, not much happened, except that the lye and oils became turbid (most with S, L and B). 10 minutes later, second shaking. Some trends begin to stand out. The “quicker” oils (those to come to unstable emulsion first) were surprisingly S and L; B and C were a bit more hesitant. M and O behaved indifferently.
A few shake-stand cycles later, things approached their more expected order, i. e. the B and M thickened up considerably, while the liquid oils were hard to convince to stay in stable emulsion. C made it a few hours later, the edible oils needed to stand overnight.
The other day, all batches have more or less saponified into a gelatinous goo. I diluted each with 250%TOM water. O, S became a snotty oleic slime. C and M hardened up to a point where I had to stir in the extra water. B was solid at first too, but easily dissolved in the extra liquid. L has turned syrupy. After a bit more of shaking/standing/heat bath, M absorbed the extra water to become a paste like solid honey. C dissolved completely into a clear, runny solution. B stayed liquid too, but some turbidity remained (for now).
In any case, it is
- fun to play with, and interesting to see the viscosity of at (roughly) identical concentrations of single-oil CP liquid soaps
- rather obvious to me that the sesame oil was the one that bugged me in my earlier bar soap. Initially it was even more eager to cloud up than B/C/M, and it added the most turbidity to the lye after the first shaking. In the end, though, it turned out to be the lazy, slow-tracing oil that I'd expect from its mostly oleic/linoleic composition. Anyhow, next time I'll use S, O, and/or C in soap, I'll whisk it with a spatula first, to see if I might spare cleaning the SB afterwards, lol. I'm glad it most probably wasn't the castor oil at least.
- More or less inadvertently, this is also the long sought-after “-ate” assembly kit that @Johnez had wondered some time ago – though for LS, where it is of course a lot easier to combine individual sesamates/mangobutterates/babassates… than it is in bar soap. Some ideas to test: Necessity/performance of castor oil to boost lather; skin irritant effect of lauric oils (babaçu) in between 0…100%; reaction of oleic/linoleic/ricinoleic/lauric/stearic oils to thinning with water and thickening with sodium salts; castile dryness vs. soap blend…