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My first recipe


botanica

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Hi there! I'm a soaping newbie, and have started to figure out a good recipe. I put my info into soapcalc.com, and am wondering if anyone has thoughts on these fatty acid percentages? Some are 0, and I don't know if I should adjust anything because of that? I don't know a whole lot about fatty acids, but my soap quality percentages were good. Thanks!!!!

Lauric 14

Linoleic 10

Linolenic 0

Myristic 6

Oleic 45

Palmitic 15

Ricinoleic 0

Stearic 2

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Thank you so much for your replies! It has been interesting plugging in different numbers of my available oils...

So, with the oils I have on hand, this is what I came up with...

40% almond(sweet)

30% coconut (is this too much coconut??)

10% macadamia

20% palm oil

(I also have sunflower and canola but thought I should leave them out to avoid DOS? And I also have olive and veg. shortening-the generic kind).

The qualities all seem on target, maybe?:

hardness: 38

cleansing:20

conditioning: 55

bubbly lather: 20

creamy lather: 18

iodine: 61

INS: 157

So what do you experts think? Any help is much appreciated, seriously! I was thinking of doing this hp really soon because I'd like to use it asap (:

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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 :)

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The cleansing # is a little high for me, buttt I like a creamier lather. All and all it looks really nice. I would definitely give it a try. Looks like an expensive recipe, but hey. I make some expensive bars of soap sometimes. If it is soft after 24 hours in the mold just let it stay there a couple of days. You have some nice oils in there. Yep I would give it a shot.

I also use sunflower and canola, I actually love canola and have never encountered dos.

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It's about what I expected except that you used almond and macadamia instead of olive. They are the same type of oils so in the future you could try it with olive and you should get a similar result for less money. At least it will be interesting to see how similar or different it comes out.

SoapCalc has an error in the database for macadamia nut oil. The palmitic should be 19% rather than 9%. That makes the recipe look a little softer than it really is.

There's no hard and fast rule for the amount of coconut oil that works well because it depends on what the other oils are. For this recipe I think 30% should be good.

So you did a nice job creating your first recipe but it's still a little soft by my reckoning. The strategic change that I believe would bring it to the next level would be to make the almond 30% and include 10% of some sort of butter. That would harden the recipe and balance it out with some stearic to improve the skin feel and make the lather a little nicer.

Have fun and good luck with your first batch!

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I would suggest that rather than over-thinking this you MAKE the soap and see what you get. You need a baseline soap to start and then when you make changes to it you can literally see and feel what the impact of those changes are - and thus learn about the contributions of different oils and their synergies. Without making soap though it's all theory...

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I personally would not waste macadamia or the sweet almond oil in a soap; you can make a lovely bar without using those higher end/ nicer oils. A simple recipe like this will make a nice bar of soap. From there, you can tweak it and see how adding different oils, while subtracting from different oils changes the properties.

45% OO (you can sub RBO or do a combo of RBO and OO)

30% PO

25% CO

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Thanks Meredith! I'll check out those oils in soapcalc and try it out. I don't want to spend more than I have to, but at the same time I have the oils already....I probably could use them for something else I guess. Maybe I'll try out both recipes and see which one I like better. It's all new to me. (:

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