My Soap Making Adventure

[LBussy]

Hi Benjamin, thanks for inviting me. Nice read and it looks like oyu are having fun. A few comments/ notes I took:

Regarding your experiments with cook times and zap-testing. You are right that the longer cooks are not all about making zap-free soap. I do a one-hour cook because that is what works for me to make the soap zap-free (of course) but also to get the consistency I like. The consistency is also a factor of the water used, and the cook of course cooks of some of the water. Long story short, it's about what works for you and your process.

Glycerin - use it! I ended up using 11% of the oil weight in glycerin and that's on top of the natural glycerin I get form the other ingredients. I believe you will notice a very nice improvement in your lather.

KOH vs NaOH: I use 100% KOH and to my mind it makes a far superior soap. There are arguments to use varying levels of NaOH, mostly for hardness, but cooking and moisture levels will address that. Plus, I've never met a shaver that REALLY wished his soap formed a nice hard bar. We want to get it soft so it loads anyway. My soap is plenty hard to form pucks and soft enough to press with some effort into a bowl if so desired. Most of the time I package it in screw-top containers or tins anyway so I only rarely make pucks.

Now getting hard bar comes at the exclusion of moisture and cooking off moisture makes it hard to form as you have discovered. Using Sodium Lactate really helps with loosening up the consistency when it's hot, and then adds to the hardness when the bar is done. You might consider trying some of that. It's a real nice addition to the process.

You mentioned a couple times the color of the bar. The lather will always be white but the bar does pick up color, especially as you use fragrance oils that may contain vanilla. I use TiO2 (titanium dioxide) to help with that. I don't add much, a little goes a long way.

Finally some have mentioned EDTA to help with water minerals. This is a very good addition and it's helped with soap scum quite a bit. Even if your water is not bad enough to impact the lather, it still helps.

That was all I could think of as I was reading through. Looks like you are having fun, keep it up!

 

[dabrock]

Actually, I really love hard soaps lol. I find that I can travel easily with them and many come with wooden bowls. Soft soaps are fine but I love a good milled puck! [emoji106]

 

[dkeester]

This latest soap sounds amazing, both its scent and its performance. I may have to start reading up on soap making again. (As if I need another hobby.)

Keep up the great posts, [MENTION=108263]rockclimber[/MENTION].

 

[LBussy]

Altoids tins make great travelers for croaps. They are as hard as you need.

 

[rockclimber]

Thanks for the help Lee! I will take your suggestions to heart my next batch and let you know what I think of the added glycerin.

 

[rockclimber]

Her brothers, I have a question for all you expert soapers... Can you have too much fluffy lather from stearic acid? I am keeping my stearic acid ratio at 50% as you can see in the tallow version 1.2 formula but the lather seems out of control and loses its yogurt consistency if I lather it more than 15 seconds or so. Could this be the castor oil instead of the stearic? Slickness and cushion seem fine but I think the yogurt consistency we all seek would be better. This feels more like a veggie soap with is loose fluffy lather instead of a tallow recipe like it is.

Here is a 15 second lather on the puck followed by a 30 second scrub in the g20 scuttle. As you can see it looses the yogurt consistency quickly. Could this be too much water? I guess I could lather less but that would defeat the point of coming up with a good tallow recipe... it should work with little or lots of water and should work with little or lots of lathering. I'm stumped... Next time I will use much less water and report back if it helps or hurts.




Edit: from the pics it is hard to tell but the consistency is not yogurt like-it is too fluffy in my opinion.

 

[azwetshaver]

If you were me what scents would you choose first? I already have my list but I would like to hear what you all would choose if you were in my position.

Uh Monkey Farts of course. How can you resist a name like that.

 

[LBussy]

Her brothers, I have a question for all you expert soapers... Can you have too much fluffy lather from stearic acid? [...] from the pics it is hard to tell but the consistency is not yogurt like-it is too fluffy in my opinion.

In my experience that's not what happens from too much Stearic. You mention 50% SA several times in this thread and I don't think I've gotten that high. The SA we buy commercially is mostly Palmitic acid so I'm not sure how you are getting it that high. My recipe gives me 18% Stearic when I do the numbers by hand, even though there's 45% "SA" in the ingredients. Higher is the 26.55% Palmitic acid.

My guess for you is that the lather is not holding enough moisture. This is where sugar or glycerin comes in. Sugar really doesn't work that well because when you get enough in there to hold enough water it becomes too sticky. Glycerin on the other hand will hold plenty of water and assuming you get enough water in there will not be sticky.

A quick test would be to put a couple drops of glycerin in your bowl as you work up a lather and see what happens.

 

[jmudrick]

Just wanted you to know that it isn't something that is considered "natural". But since you brought it up, a vegan I know would be concerned about that! Here are a couple of links which concern this matter:

http://www.veghealthguide.com/oils-fats/

http://vegetarian.about.com/od/glossary/g/transfat.htm

David

I know of no studies that indicate that the use of soy wax in soap or cosmetics is harmful. FWIW the EWG database lists hydrogenated vegetable oils as low risk generally. On the other hand, having lived in SE Asia (Cambodia) for ten years I know exactly what's wrong with the use of palm oil. I use soy in my shave soaps and wouldn't think of using palm given its environmental consequences and how well soy performs due to its high stearic acid content.

http://www.ewg.org/skindeep/ingredient/702963/HYDROGENATED_VEGETABLE_OIL/

 

[dangerousdon]

I know of no studies that indicate that the use of soy wax in soap or cosmetics is harmful. FWIW the EWG database lists hydrogenated vegetable oils as low risk generally. On the other hand, having lived in SE Asia (Cambodia) for ten years I know exactly what's wrong with the use of palm oil. I use soy in my shave soaps and wouldn't think of using palm given its environmental consequences and how well soy performs due to its high stearic acid content.

http://www.ewg.org/skindeep/ingredient/702963/HYDROGENATED_VEGETABLE_OIL/

Thanks for the insight. I for one was ignorant to this information. I will now be on the look out for soaps in general that use palm oil.

 

[rockclimber]

Thank you Lee! You are one of many expert soapers who has told me the same thing about glycerin so I will definitely take that to heart and use extra glycerin in my next batch. I appreciate everything everyone has done for me in this thread. I hope the entire Community here is learning as much as I am because the end result will be better soap for everyone and a better appreciation from the members for what the vendors here do for us. I know I've gained a profound amount of respect for the Artisan soap makers here. I will never go back to shaving with a cartridge razor or store-bought soap!

 

[dabrock]

Thank you Lee! You are one of many expert soapers who has told me the same thing about glycerin so I will definitely take that to heart and use extra glycerin in my next batch. I appreciate everything everyone has done for me in this thread. I hope the entire Community here is learning as much as I am because the end result will be better soap for everyone and a better appreciation from the members for what the vendors here do for us. I know I've gained a profound amount of respect for the Artisan soap makers here. I will never go back to shaving with a cartridge razor or store-bought soap!

How did it go when you added a couple drops of glycerin?

 

[paintflinger]

Looking at that lather, I'd load with a drier brush till the proto lather is creamy. I'd skip the scuttle since I find that it gets the lather too fluffy and face/palm lather with paintbrush strokes, slowly adding water a little bit at a time. I'd be willing to bet that would get you some creamy, thick, and slick lather.

 

[LBussy]

Looking at that lather, I'd load with a drier brush till the proto lather is creamy. I'd skip the scuttle since I find that it gets the lather too fluffy and face/palm lather with paintbrush strokes, slowly adding water a little bit at a time. I'd be willing to bet that would get you some creamy, thick, and slick lather.

If I had to go through all that trouble I'd still blame the soap.

 

[paintflinger]

If I had to go through all that trouble I'd still blame the soap.

I'm not sure why it's trouble?

Every one of the things I suggested are tweaks to the lathering process from my own experience playing with a rather large variety of soaps trying to get the thickest, slickest, and creamiest lather I can. When you get down to it though, it is no less complicated than loading the soap, building the lather in the scuttle, and then painting on the face. It simply took more words to describe it since it is a departure from what [MENTION=108263]rockclimber[/MENTION] normally does. Total time to load and lather would be 2-3 minutes tops.

The soap recipe more than likely can be improved, but sometimes it's a good thing to step back and question everything you do, from the hardware, to loading, to lathering, to the shave, to the post shave. Everyone states YMMV, but this is something that I believe is true for everyone.

 

[LBussy]

Maybe my flippant answer leaves an impression I did not intend.

I have a very short list of soaps I use anymore. Coincidentally, all of them behave just about the same way. If I have to doctor them along, do certain things, deviate from my normal practices, I consider them to be lacking multiple characteristics that make them a good soap. If I can't use a scuttle for instance, I can't get a second pass and therefore it's not a soap I'm going to keep around. If I have to change three different things to get an acceptable lather I have no idea what the issue is, only that if I completely change my routine I might be able to make a passable lather out of a substandard soap. When I suggest adding glycerin for instance, it's an empirical test to determine if there's a single characteristic that's lacking in the soap which can be changed in a subsequent batch to improve it.

Change one thing at a time, and if you always lather one way - always lather that way. At least when you are testing soaps that is. Then when you have a recipe which works for you the way you want you have *your* best soap. Changing the way your lather preparation process works is not an item which is translatable into a process or component change in the recipe. It just means that if you do something else in preparation the lather is different. You don't really get anything actionable out of that.

Now then - if you bought a soap and you like it and want to keep it: The advice to change process is good. You need to figure out how to make THAT soap work. I used to have some soap like that. LPV is one such soap for me. LOVE the scent, the performance was only ever so-so for me. I tried a lot of things to get performance out of it and finally settled on a process that made it passable enough to use.

I'm also rather tired and if I sound grumpy please write it off as that and not me trying to be an a-hole.

 

[rockclimber]

I still blame the soap that's why I said I needed to adjust the recipe. I agree that special treatment to get an acceptable lather *cough williams* makes a soap unusable for me. I will perfect the recipe, it may take another 5 years but it will be done.

 

[rockclimber]

Looking to make another veggie soap but the conditioning is too low on this one. Tallow adds a lot of conditioning so I have to make up for it with an oil that is very conditioning. Olive oil, castor oil, Crisco, soybean oil, sesame oil, flax oil, linseed oil, hazelnut oil, hemp oil, almond oil, canola oil, evening primrose oil and Meadow Farm oil all have lots of conditioning properties but I don't want to buy all of these LOL maybe I'll end up just using palm oil as it adds both condition and creamy at the same time. There is so much to this hobby I could spend years making soaps!

 

[rockclimber]

I also want to make a Tallow recipe without coconut oil like some of the soap vendors here do. This was actually the very first recipe I invented when I started this hobby but have yet to actually make it.

 

[rockclimber]

I want to make a traditional Marseille soap, not just a 50% or more Olive Oil Soap but I hear that in general they all use a fully boiled method of production. Basically it is precipitating the soap out of solution using salt. I have not found any good websites detailing how to make hand soap like this and was wondering if anyone had a link? I know it will have to age for over 6 months but I would like to get it going now rather than later due to the long aging time.