MarieJeanette

The Cucumber/Melon from SweetCakes is my favorite version. The scent sticks in my soap and doesn't A or D. MarieJeanette

I have Midsummer's Night from WholesaleSuppliesPlus and I absolutely love it. MarieJeanette

Nope, but thanks for that link. It was actually called Maui Soap Works. http://www.mauisoapworks.com/ I just wanted to make mention that besides hardening up well, the soaps my sis brought back to me ended up being really nice after a good cure. I use them at my kitchen sink, and their recipe is such that it feels great on my skin. I don't need to use lotion after washing with them. It's just too bad that they didn't make any mention to my sis about curing them when they were bought. I wonder how many new, but potential repeat customers they might be losing over it, for they certainly lost my sister. MarieJeanette

Ditto what Meredith said. Here's a personal example of how they might be uncured soap: My sis went to Hawaii for her honeymoon 5 months ago and ran into a handmade soap company on one of the islands. She bought some for herself to use while there, and also a small stack of soap samples to bring back as a gift to me to try out. Every single bar (there were about 8) was as soft as cheese when she gave them to me. They looked and smelled lovely, and had lovely packaging, but they were all very squishy. She told me she had tried using one of the bars while she was still in Hawaii, but it wasn't a good experience. She ended up having to settle for a bar Ivory soap from a local grocery store to use instead. They (the handmade soaps) must have been freshly unmolded and cut when my sis bought them because they eventually became good and hard after I let them sit for about a month or so. You'd think that the soapmakers would have mentioned this when my sis bought them, but nope, not a word. :rolleyes2 MarieJeanette

I'm probably the odd woman out, but I believe the fatty acid numbers that you posted would make a great soap. Even though the stearic is low, your lauric, myristic, palmitic and oleic (which makes for quite a hard soap over time), make up for it. I have a couple of recipes with a similar fatty acid profile, and the resulting soaps are good and hard in spite of the low stearic # (my stearic was 5). It's perfectly fine to have 0 for linolenic. It's actually very rare to get anything higher than 0 or 1 for that acid. As for ricinoleic acid, unless your recipe has castor oil in it, you'll always get a 0. Castor oil is the only oil with ricinoleic acid in it. Your recipe looks fine to me and definitely worth a try. I personally don't see anything wrong with your coconut level, especially since you have a good oleic/linoleic amount to balance it out, but that's just my opinion. I know others might disagree, but it really all comes down to what feels good on your individual skin. To my skin, 30% coconut is perfectly fine as long as there's a good amount of oleic and/or linoleic to balance it out. Your recipe looks like it would be quite compatable with my skin. MarieJeanette

Very well said, topofmurrayhill. I, too, have learned that temperature is very relevant for certain oils/fats. I used to soap every one of my batches when everything was cooled down to room temp, but I began to notice that I always ended up having troublesome issues with certain oils/fats like PKO, cocoa butter, mango butter, illipe butter, and kokum butter. They either caused faster trace, or else curdling, or ricing, even before adding the F/O at times. It took me a little while to put 2 + 2 together, but the pesky issues totally went away for me when I started soaping those particular oils/fats at 120 degreesF. Also since doing that, the little 'stearic spots' that would show up in my finished soap went away as well. Vanessa- whether you let your soaps gel or not, they still end up as great soap after a good cure.

No, not at all necessary. I've never deducted any oil or water from my formula to make up the difference due to the F/O, and my soaps always come out great. There's absolutely no need to, and unless you know exactly what your F/O contains, there's a potential that doing so could actually throw your formula off. To explain- if you were to deduct from your oils, I'm pretty sure that doing so would lead to your lye amounts being off. Not a good thing. Although it would be safer to deduct from your water amount, this, too, could be problematic if you are using a F/O prone to seizing. RE: Honey- I regularly use honey in some of my soaps and never deduct from my oil or water amounts when adding it, and they come out great, too. (I never go over 1 tbsp. ppo with honey) HTH! MarieJeanette :smiley2:

I use finely powdered activated charcoal @ 1 tsp. ppo. MarieJeanette

I've soaped Salty Sailor, and yes, it is the same exact fragrance oil as Salty Mariner. It moves fast, but it's always quite manageable for me, even at 120 degressF and a 33% lye solution. MarieJeanette

Gel will give soaps more of a transluscent look to them, and certain colors can morph when gelled, but there are ways to work around that. Adding a bit of titanium dioxide will make a gelled soap appear quite solid or opaque, for instance, and stickblending your colorants in real well will help to prevent mottling. Also, making sure to add enough colorant is important, too, as is taking into consideration the color of your main base. Some soap bases are quite yellowish in color, and if you were hoping for a blue soap but didn't add enough colorant to overpower it, you will end up with a green soap because blue and yellow make green. Also- if your soap goes into gel, you'll want to make sure to encourage it to reach full gel by insulating or adding warmth. Partial gel can contribute to a mottled look, with some parts of your soap appearing lighter in color than others. HTH! :smiley2: MarieJeanette

It looks very good to me 'Quality-wise' on SoapCalc, but 'Fatty Acid-wise', the linoleic acid content is fairly high at 19%. I personally like to keep my linoleic at 10% or under to prevent DOS. If it were me, I would substitute lard in place of the Crisco. That will give you 10% linoleic acid content, plus give you a harder bar. :smiley2: MarieJeanette

Welcome! :wave: I love using lard in my soaps. I've soaped many batches of lard soap at 120 degreesF and have never had a problem with a piggy smell. It's the last fat to go into my pot while heating my oils/fats. MarieJeanette

A good way to see if it is M&P is to break off a good chunk and melt it in a pot on the stove. If it's M&P, it will melt very smoothly and in hardly no time at all. If it doesn't, then it's more than likely not M&P. CP or HP do not melt anywhere as smoothly as M&P, and it takes much longer. If it is M&P (or CP or HP for that matter), you can chunk it up and add it 'as is' to fresh CP for decorative purposes, but as Amylynn said, I wouldn't melt M&P down to add to your CP batter. Well.... not unless you happen to be going for a 'goopy gum' look, that is. I did that to a 'bubblegum' scented soap once. I aded some pink colored, melted M&P to my CP batter, and it turned out pretty cool looking, like there were melted 'bublegum' strands dispersed throughout my soap. The kids loved it! HTH! :smiley2: MarieJeanette

That definitely sounds like a soap made with mostly, if not all, olive oil as the fatty acid content. Olive oil has a lot of oleic acid in it which is famous (or infamous, depending on how you look at it:wink2: ) for readily forming a colloidal suspension (or slime, as some describe it) on the surface of soap when wet. It solidifies back up when dry, though. A lot of people with sensitive skin love olive oil soaps (or Castile's) and the sliminess does not bother them at all, while others despise it. I personally don't mind it the least bit now that I know what it is -simply a colloidal suspension of oleic acid that my skin seems to love. MarieJeanette :smiley2:

Yes, that is true! :smiley2: Yes, you'll want to puree the bejeebees out of the carrot and cucumbers so that no chunks remain. It should look like the consistency of baby food, or pureed pumpkin from a can. Chunks of food can get moldy from what I've heard from other soapers who have had that happen to them. They've never had that problem with pureed, though. If you puree it well so that no chunks remain, it should last a long time. Before I tried using pureed food in my own soap last month, I read extensively about it on different soaping forums, and many soapers wrote of having foodie soap bars going on 3 and 4 years old with no problems. My first ever pureed avocado soap with cucumber juice is 6 weeks old now and is as fresh as the day I made it. I also have soap made from strained carrot juice that is a year old and still doing great. Nope. No preservative needed. The particular pH of finished CP soap is such that preservatives are pretty much redundant. I've never used any and don't know of any that do (not that there aren't some out there that do). You're welcome! :smiley2: MarieJeanette

Mine get quite hard and last longer than my all-veggie bars. I've never made 100% lard soap, though. I have two favorite lard bars. One with 26.5% lard and one with 23%. In my bars with the 23%, I also use 20% tallow in conjuction with the lard, and the combo of the two is phenominal. The addition of the tallow increases the hardness and longevity values even more. In my 26.5% lard bar, I don't have tallow in it, but I have a lot of PKO in it, which lends a good level of hardness and longevity (and bubbles). It also has olive and castor in it, and it bubbles quite readily and copiously. I must say that one thing I have noticed with my soaps over time is that if a bar of my soap bubbles up quite readily and copiously, it lasts much longer in my shower than those that are slower to lather, because the quick and copius lathering soap is not being overworked as much as the other to build up the lather and get it going. Maybe the reason why your 100% lard soap is disappearing quicker is because it's being overworked perhaps to get the lather going? Don't know if that helps, but that's all I can come up with as the possible culprit right now. MarieJeanette

I love titanium dioxide for the versitility it brings to my colored soaps. I have the water based, but sometimes I don't want the titanium dioxide throughout my whole soap, and so I'll mix a little bit of it in some glycerin and then add to whatever portion of soap I want it in, incorporating it with a stickblender. It works great even though it says it's water based. I made two cucumber soaps last week. I ran my cucumber through my juicer, peel and all, strained it it, and added it at trace as half my water amount (using the other half of my liquid amount as distilled water to mix with my lye). Juicing the cucumber with the peel and all made such a beautiful shade of green, but I heard the soap can turn yellowish over time, so I also added a pinch of chromium hydroxide green to the batch so that it would be sure to maintain a green color further down the road. MarieJeanette

I make a great pumice soap that my sometimes grubby hubby loves. I use 2 tablespoons of finely ground pumice ppo, and I whisk it into the soap at thick trace, right before I pour. If you add the pumice too early and pour at thin trace, there's a chance that the pumice will sink to the bottom. HTH! MarieJeanette

According to this site, it can also be made without urine: http://www.medterms.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=5905 The site says that in 1828, a German chemist by the name of Friedrich Wöhler discovered how to make urea 'by accident' when he attempted to make ammonium cyanate from silver cyanide and ammonium chloride. Very interesting. Who knew? MarieJeanette

I just made my second batch of charcoal soap 2 days ago. I use 1 teaspoon ppo and I stir it straight into my warm oils before I add the lye. It mixes in quite readily with no fuss. I use activated charcoal from the health-food store. I love how black the soap comes out. At 1 tsp. ppo, I don't get black lather either. MarieJeanette

I really like Sugared Spruce from WSP. All of the people I gave soap to scented with it really liked it, too. MarieJeanette

I use 1 tablespoon of CM powder per every two ounces of water to get a normal dilution. I get my powdered coconut at my local Asian market, and that's what the package directions say. If I want more of a coconut cream kind of consistency, it says I can add more to make it thicker. MarieJeanette

Go right on ahead! :smiley2: Nobody actually owns the term as far as I know. It's a pretty common chemical term. I came across it one day as I was reading a chemist describing what the 'slime' on Castile soap actually is and how it is formed. I loved the term so much that I started using it. It definitely sounds much, much nicer than 'slime' if you ask me. MarieJeanette

I love Castile's (or Castile-types, or Bastiles, or whatever everyone else prefers to call them)! I make different kinds of them all the time. Some have 50% olive, 60% olive, 80% olive, and 100% olive. I just recently started making one with 72% olive. The 72% olive is based on recipes I found on the net for an olive oil soap called Savon de Marseilles which is an old and well-known olive oil soap from France. From what I've read, it's traditionally made from 72% olive oil, with the rest of the oil percentage being made up of coconut oil and palm oil. I don't know exactly how much of a percentage of the latter 2 that I should use though, because the only percent they ever divulge is the 72% for the olive amount. I came up with my own recipe using the given 72% olive and fudging the rest using SoapCalc to go off of, and I replaced the palm in the recipe with tallow since I have no palm on hand, but plenty of tallow. I also put French Green Clay in it and it turned out great. My DH loves to shave with it. I use all my Castile's or Castile-types after a four week cure, and they are fine (I soap with a 33% lye solution). While it's true the Castile's are even better with a longer cure, I've found them to be plenty nice enough for me personally to use by 4 weeks. But then again, I'm one of those that doesn't mind the slime (or as I prefer to call it- 'the colloidal suspension caused by the high amount of oleic acid') on the younger soaps at all. MarieJeanette

I have two recommendations for a straight-up Parma Violet scent: 1.) Daystar's Blooming Violets 2) WSP's Violet Bouquet I can't tell how long I've been searching for a true Parma Violet scent until I found these two. I have 2 bottles of lovely perfume at home made from Parma violets. One is made by Yardley, and the other one is made by Agustin Reyes. I used to have a third that was imported from England, but it's all gone now. Anyway, even though they were all made by different companies, they were all made with Parma violets and they all smelled wonderfully the same. The smell in those perfumes is just so lovely to me that I soon found myself on a quest to find an F/O with that same wonderful Parma violet smell so I could make soap with it. I've bought many different violet F/Os over the past two years, but they just couldn't compare with that distinctive violet smell that I detected in my 3 Parma violet perfumes. Until recently, that is. Check out Daystar's and WSP's. I have both of them and both are true (they smell exactly like my bottles of Yardley, Agustin Reyes, and my now depleted import from England), but Daystar's is the stronger of the two as far as scent throw goes. HTH! MarieJeanette