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Tweak?


chuck_35550

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Hmmmm. Barbara that reduces the possible harshness on the cleansing, but it makes me wonder if this recipe is worth trying. What qualities does anyone see in this recipe? I'd like to get off topic and ask you folks what to do with some safflower that I bought. I didn't buy high oleic and the regular doesn't seem to have any purpose. Thanks for the responses.

Steve

Edited by chuck_35550
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I think the cleansing number needed work and the suds/creamy is still not what I would like (inverted would be better). The sat/unsat balance thing has me afraid to drastically change things. I wish I had the knowledge to manipulate the properties of these oils and weren't so dependent on soapcalc. I get the feeling that a spread sheet would be more helpful but that's beyond my knowledge.

Steve

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have you made the soap yet? with this recipe?

i don't think it's necessarily bad - you probably can improve on it - but the best way to learn is to try things.

flipping a 21 and 24 around won't change things much, IME. but then numbers don't tell it all.

I personally would reduce the olive, take out the shea oil, and increase the tallow, pko and coconut if you want a rich yet sudsy soaps

you can soap with regular safflower, but keep it to about 10% or so - better yet use it to cook with.

I should go by fatty acid profile of the blend, and I guess I do in a way, but for the most part I work off the experience gained by taking a systematic approach to modifying soap formulas. It's like chemistry lab - it's all theory until you do it.

Edited by CareBear
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Do you have any other oils to play with, because I personally wouldn't put tallow and crisco together to hog the recipe so to speak. I might consider it if I were short on tallow, but if I wasn't, I wouldn't use the crisco. Maybe there's that much of a difference between them, but I don't really think so.

Edited by Scented
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I personally wouldn't put tallow and crisco together to hog the recipe so to speak...Maybe there's that much of a difference between them, but I don't really think so.

The superficial resemblance between Crisco and natural hard oils can confuse soap recipe formulation if people don't take the difference into account. Crisco is a significantly different thing.

To make Crisco, they trans-esterify a very soft linoleic oil with a hard oil, so that the whole shebang becomes solid. In fact, the fatty acid profile of Crisco is currently just like 25% palm oil and 75% soybean oil, right on the dot.

That's fine if you understand it and want soybean oil in your recipe, but using a lot of Crisco as if it's lard or tallow can throw things out of whack, seeing as soybean isn't a base soaping oil.

Lard and tallow are palmitic oils with a soft oleic component and some stearic too. They are relatively well-balanced oils. Crisco is a man-made blend that isn't very well balanced for soaping at all.

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I think the cleansing number needed work and the suds/creamy is still not what I would like (inverted would be better).

You have 30% lauric oils in your recipe. That's fairly typical and usually produces a nice bubbly soap. Whether the bar is more or less bubbly will also depend on the other oils in your recipe. SoapCalc has no clue about that. It's bubbly/creamy numbers are not nearly accurate enough to warrant agonizing over a few points difference.

The idea of designing a soap by fiddling around in detail with those numbers is an illusion. The real process is to make soap, evaluate soap, change recipe, repeat ad infinitum.

There are all kinds of numbers in SoapCalc that can help you if you like to get into the numbers, but it takes experience to know how to read them. You haven't learned yet what to focus on.

Edited by topofmurrayhill
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You said a mouth full. I've been cp soaping for several years now and my earlier, simpler soaps were much better in the way of how well they left your skin feeling. Customers want a hard bar that lasts forever and makes their skin so soft and has lots of bubbles. It seems that no matter which direction I take, those qualities seem polar. Well, thanks for all your honesty and help. I guess the only thing to do is keep trying until it begins to sink into my understanding. You guys have been a lot of help, as usual.

Steve

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