using dairy butter for soap

[keekee505]

Hi i am very new to soap making. only a few days. I have just made a soap recipe using 30% coconut oil with 70% unsalted dairy butter (i melted it and only used the clarified butter) will this work or have i made a huge booboo? I used the soapcalc to get my amounts of oils, water and lye.
can soap be made using dairy butter? has anyone tried it? what were the results?

 

[AliOop]

You can do it, but it won't smell nice. Butter has something in it (butyrate, maybe?) that smells terrible in soap.

ETA: here is a link to an older post that discusses using butter or ghee to make soap:

Recipe for cheap soap in India (no palm, no lard)

 

[shunt2011]

It makes very stinky soap. If you do a search this comes up once in awhile.

 

[DeeAnna]

The odor of butyric acid in soap is odd but not horrible to my nose, so YMMV on that.

This fatty acid, like the shorter-chain fatty acids in coconut oil, can cause the soap to be a strong cleanser. So it might more drying to the skin than a person might want, especially since you also used 30% coconut in the recipe.

One other thing -- did you account for the water in the butter? Butter is not pure fat. If you didn't adjust for the water content, your soap might not have enough fat to consume all the NaOH, and it might be lye heavy. Not saying it is, but it could be. You should carefully zap test this soap before you use it.

https://www.soapmakingforum.com/threads/how-to-properly-safely-conduct-the-zap-tongue-test.63199/

 

[cmzaha]

BAD plan. It makes for very stinky hands. Just ask me how I know. I did not necessarily smell it in the soap but after washing my hands with it. There was a group of us in an older forum that tried it several years ago and we all had the same results. It just did not turn out nice smelling.

 

[DeeAnna]

I think the batch I made was 30% butter, and it honestly wasn't horrid smelling in the bar or on the skin. That said, I'll concede it wasn't the nicest nor prettiest soap I've ever made either.

Soap with butter falls in the same category as soap made with rosin (colophony). I wasn't impressed enough with the soap made from either ingredient to feel any desire to repeat the experiments.

Neem oil and pine tar, on the other hand, are two ingredients with odd odors that I do like to use in soap and have made repeat batches of both.

 

[keekee505]

Thanks guys. The result was as you have all said. A strange smelling soap that is very hard. It does however give a good lather but i have a feeling that with time the soap will continue to smell worse with age. I was impressed with how hard it got over night. It was worth the try but i wont be doing it again.