looking for a recipe for a hard bar w/ lots of bubbley latherand great condtioning

[JMCintosh]

I am looking for a recipe for a hard bar w/lots of bubbley latherand and great condtioning. I tried a basic recipe but it had no bubbles. I have made 3 batches of CP soap in the last week and all three were too soft, or lost fragrance. Then I found one that was posted on another site and it had more creamy lather then bubbles. (I ran them through soap calc.) So I motified a recipe I found and want to know how it sounds. Any input would help.

It is a 6 lb batch. (I also ran it through soap calc.)

10%castor oil

35%coconut oil

25%lard

15%olive oil

10% sweet almond oil

5%cocoa butter

lye- 13.99 ounces

water-36.48 ounces

I came up with:

hardness 44, cleansing 24, coundition 50, bubbley lather 33, creamy lather 29, iodine 50, INS 168

Does this sound right? Pigment powder as color or cocoa powder.

[CareBear]

I am looking for a recipe for a hard bar w/lots of bubbley latherand and great condtioning.

Aren't we all...

add stark white, and of course a simple recipe with affordable oils you can get locally and you 'll have the holy grail!

As for soft and losing fragrance, you cannot really judge either in a week's time. soft can be a function of water still in the soap - a good cure can change that. Plus with only a 27% lye solution you have a lot of water to get rid of. And that extra water can be impacting your lather.

I didn't run it through the calculator myself, but a superfat over 6% or so can really leave your soap soft as well.

Fragrance - fragrance can fade and come back, can morph (change) into something icky or something wonderful or can be stable. can't judge any of these for sure until a couple of weeks have passed.

Also, 6# for an experimental batch is pretty darned expensive, I recommend 2# batches.

I suggest you slow it down a bit... don't reject any recipe (or FO) until a decent cure period of at least 2 weeks, 3-4 is better. Take that time to read more about soaping and play with soapcalc, but remember - those numbers are NOT necessarily representative of what you will get.

This said, your recipe sounds nice.

[asheebeans]

Personally I would switch the lard and coconut percentages, but that's just me! :rolleyes2 I have alligator skin, BTW and I loooove lard soap! It makes my skin feel "not so alligator-y". I would also knock 5% off of the sweet almond and add an extra 5% of olive too.....but again, that's just me! Good luck and have fun!

p.s. Keep playing with soapcalc, too, btw. I have been making soap for four years now but by adding a new oil into the equation I was able to change up some percentages in my dry skin's favor without losing much in the way of bubbles. It can be done!

[msmeredith]

I would reduce coconut and maybe up the olive or almond for a more conditioning bar and less cleansing.

[topofmurrayhill]

The conditioning number in SoapCalc means nothing. By great conditioning we usually mean a soap that's mild. In that regard, what you leave out is as important as what you put in. I've tried numerous recipes with 35% lauric oils (coconut, pko, babassu). If you're going for a luxury bar and skin feel is a high priority, I think it's always better if you can use less than that. Maybe limit the CO to 30%, or switch the CO and lard amounts like asheebeans suggested.

There are lots of ways of doing things, but when you're starting out it might be best to get the feel of doing things normally. I see people using big lye discounts to make special recipes like 100% coconut oil soaps. The large amount of residual oil makes the soap clean less efficiently so that it isn't as drying. Your recipe is pretty conventional though, so I'd just stick with the standard 5% lye discount.

Castor oil will bloat the lather numbers in SoapCalc, but it doesn't necessarily work out that way in reality. I'd take out some of the castor and allocate it to any of the other ingredients. Either the olive/almond, or the cocoa butter if you prefer to go for extra life in the shower, or the lard to split the difference.

Personally I don't have a problem with the amount of almond oil. It's a nice oil in the same family as olive oil, but will bump up the linoleic a bit. If you don't mind the cost, 10% or 15% will make a more meaningful difference in the recipe than 5%.

[Fire and Ice]

Try Crafty AJ's Goats Milk soap!

Or Michelle's Shortning and Shea recipe! Both are excellent bars for high lather and conditioing. Dawn's Basic Bar is also a great recipe.

I have taken many recipe's here and tweaked them for myself and my customers. You have to know the properties of your oils and butters and what adds what to the soap. You need to study your oils and butter properties more more.

BTW~ That was a very large amount of Cocnut Oil in your recipe. There are better ways of adding hardness to a bar rather than upping the coconut!.:embarasse

Fire

[Meridith]

I think you have to just make soap to figure out what it is that YOU want from a recipe and how to get that using the oils and butters you have or you like to use. Soap making is a lot of trial and error and it takes time to develop your own recipe. Use the soap calc as a guide but know that the number ranges it gives for soap qualities is just a guide line and is not written in stone. Only experience can show you what numbers you want or like which can be different from what the next person likes.

[Scented]

You know, in my great search for a bubbly bar I ran into a harsh bar and I think you may get just that with that amount of coconut IF you don't superfat that coconut.

I have what I call a nice foamy later and no irritation, not even on 70-80-year-old women with sensitive skin. So if you want to use THAT much coconut, I think you need to really superfat it, which will make it more tolerant. Then you get the joys of tinkering with the amounts of the other oils to find what feels just right.

Good luck with that search!! It's really kinda fun to do, but I'd suggest cutting your batches down to 1 1/2-2 lb batches ... then you aren't using up so many oils so quickly.