A big test of 100% one oil soaps – part I
Formulating your own soap recipe can be tricky. There are some nice tools estimating the final soap characteristics like hardness, conditioning, bubliness, creaminess of lather like for example soapcalc.
But getting the real feel of it is an experience.
And while this estimate gives you an idea on the final soap characteristics, it won’t tell you how each oil reacts in the saponification process, what would be the color of the soap or how fast it will go rancid (although this can be estimated from the oil shelf life itself)
Therefore I decided to make a test of ten 100% one-oil soaps, to get a feeling about:
- how the oils react in the saponification – e.g. do they trace fast or you have to whip long time?
- the cure time
- the final soap color
- hardness, bubliness, creaminess of lather
I will share with you my experience in two posts. The results are more interesting than I expected – some soaps did not behave according to estimates at all…
Contents
The one oil soap experiment set up
- For molds I used individual 150 ml plastic containers I had from some diary product. Therefore I set up the oil quantity to 50g, so that after adding the lye I still can stir comfortably.
- I marked the molds with numbers so that I know which contains which oil
- Because the molds are individual, and loose quickly heat, I tried to have higher oil+lye mixing temperatures – I opted for the recommended 47°C from The Soapmaker’s Companion
- I also tried to stir first by hand – to find out if the blender is necessary – only if I found it too long (more than 10 minutes), I used the blender – I aimed for thick trace
Table 1 shows the recipe and experimental conditions for each soap. The sodium hydroxide was calculated using SoapCalc.
SAPgroup | Oil | Weight (g) | Superfat | Mixing temperature (°C) | Trace temperature (°C) | |||
Oil | NaOH | Distilled water | Oil | NaOH | ||||
1 |
Coconut oil
|
50 | 8.7 | 19 | 5% | 48 | 33 | 33 |
2 |
Palm oil
|
50 | 6.7 | 19 | 5% | 44 | 49 | |
Olive oil
|
50 | 6.4 | 19 | 5% | 49 | 34 | 29 | |
Corn oil
|
50 | 6.5 | 19 | 5% | 49 | 29 | 30 | |
Peanut oil
|
50 | 6.5 | 19 | 4% | 30 | 45 | 30 | |
Cocoa butter
|
50 | 6.6 | 19 | 5% | 48 | 49 | NA | |
3 |
Castor oil
|
50 | 6.1 | 19 | 5% | 49 | 50 | 37 |
Shea butter
|
50 | 6.1 | 19 | 5% | 48 | 40 | 35 | |
4 |
Jojoba oil
|
50 | 3.1 | 19 | 5% | 50 | 47 | 30 |
Beeswax
|
50 | 3.2 | 19 | 5% | 68 | 68 | 42 |
Jojoba oil and beeswax are waxes and need only half of the quantity of sodium hydroxide, because they can contain 50% or more unsaponifiables.
100% oil soaps – behavior in trace
Table 2 Summarizes how the soap behavior until trace.
Castor oil, shea butter, palm oil and beeswax traced without using blender, castor and shea tracing the fastest, followed by palm oil.
Soaps after 24 hours – unmolding
I unmolded soaps after 24 hours. A nice adventure 🙂 Of course, I took pictures and tried soap hardness by thumb imprint before unmolding.
The softest soap was from peanut oil, the hardest was from cocoa butter.
Soaps after 24 hours – soap color
There were significant differences in color between soaps. The best is to compare color between soaps on one photo. Also, I did not reproduce well the color on the pictures I have taken, however I did my best. Here you have a series of pictures of unmolded soaps that hopefully help you get a feeling…
As a bonus, I have made a video.
The whitest soap was the coconut oil soap, followed by castor oil soap, which was slightly translucent. Both followed by palm oil soap which was of white-creamy color, a bit more creamy were shea butter and corn oil soaps.
Rather cream yellow was peanut oil soap.
Olive oil soap was yellow-green and started to loose color through expanding white spots within the following days after unmolding. After two weeks it was completely cream-white.
Cocoa butter soap kept the darker yellow color of the cocoa butter and jojoba oil soap – or rather the floating part of it – was bright yellow.
Beeswax soap was beige, interestingly, upon touch it darkened.
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Left – cocoa butter soap, right – castor oil soap |
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Coconut oil soap |
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Olive oil soap |
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Corn oil soap |
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Cocoa butter soap |
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Shea butter soap |
Although I could unmold the peanut oil soap with help of freezer after 3 days, it remained very soft.
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Peanut oil soap after 3 days |
See the following part:
1. A big test of 100% one oil soap – soap foaming after 2 weeks of curing and pH test
This entry was posted by evik on January 6, 2013 at 18:21, and is filed under My soap experiments, soapmaking. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0.You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.
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#3 written by Marilyn 8 years ago
Thanks for doing this! It’s wonderful. I wish you had soybean and canola. I’m a big fan of those, though they’re often dismissed as filler oils that cause DOS. I haven’t had that experience at all and have been using them for 14 years.
I guess I could do my own, huh? Love your website. This is the first time I’ve seen it.
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Good example for – how wrong soap calculator can be 🙂 . You use same amount of water for all your soaps. This is the part where soap calculator is wrong! What you really need for saponification – oil and lye. Why do you need water ? To dissolve the lye . Nothing else . Soap calculator calculate your water to oils – but here is no connection between oils and water. As result you hear myth about hard and quickly reacting coconut soap and not reacting runny Castile soap. Lets look at calculator. Coconut soap for 100 grams of oil recommend 38 grams of water and 17.41 grams of lye. Jojoba soap 38 water and only 6.23 grams of lye. As result lye solution in first will be very strong – stronger lye produce lover gel temperature and very quick hardening and crumbles . In jojoba lye is to watery which giving slow reactions and separation . Technically for jojoba soap 7 grams of water will be enuf do dissolve the lye and produce nice soap. Calculator recommend to use 5.4 times more than you really need. It’s like cooking bread and use same amount of yeast for two loafs, one loaf and for 5 loafs.
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#8 written by Tereze 8 years ago
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#10 written by Joyce 8 years ago
This is so interesting to see, and u shared. Thank you as I was curious. My husband passed away Christmas and I want to make soap to sell for some income. I have a big jug of peanut oil but that doesn’t look too promising. I checked lard at Walmart and it has added ingredients, I want just lard so not sure where to find plain lard. Well thank you for this
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What a beautiful experiment! So happy you did this and shared your thorough information 🙂 I do have a question though. I am wondering after they cured which ones worked the best, or if any didnt work at all. It would be super helpful if you could let me know which ones works and which didn’t. Thankd again so much! Love this blog btw!
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#12 written by Tasha 7 years ago
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#14 written by Brittany 6 years ago
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#17 written by evik 6 years ago
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Hi Evik,
Fascinating post. You should have added photos of the lather as well to complete the story 😀 (didn’t want the post to end)
But the most useful unrelated idea I got from the post was the potential for using beeswax as a homemade emulsifier. I’d been searching for ideas along this line for quite a while and here I find it, out of the blue, when reading up something else!
Thank you.
Vidyut
(fascinated by the geekery of soap making) -
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#22 written by Nathalia 5 years ago
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#23 written by evik 5 years ago
Hi Nathalia, it seems you used 100% fractionated coconut oil, is that correct? This oil gives very hard soap that cracks and yes, results in crystals on the top. Not much foam either. You did nothing wrong in the process, except for you gave too little water and also, you should definitely combine it with another oil.
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#25 written by Karen 4 years ago
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#29 written by Weiann Lim 4 years ago
You are great! This is all I wanted to know about soap making but I have no time to do that. You did a great job. Big clap for you! Do you think we should blend the soft oil first and add in hard oil last before reaching trace since each of them having different property and trace at different timing?
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Wow Evik,
I always admire ur passion and energy. u put gtr n nice info on ur blog.