simple soap recipe recommendations

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araleigh

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Hi - I have amassed some ingredients - and am bent on making myself some soap!

I've been perusing your fantastic forum and find many of the recipies daunting

PLEASE recommend a SIMPLE basic starter soap recipe.


THanks so much
much appreiciated
alissa
 
A really simple starter recipe is a basic pure olive oil soap.

32 ounces of olive oil
4.33 ounces of lye
10.10 ounces of water.

Makes 2lbs of soap.

And remember-alwaysalwaysalways add the lye to the water, NOT the water to the lye.

Edit: So that this is more a recipe and less a list of ingredients, lol-sorry

Wearing safety goggles and gloves, and in a well ventilated area or outside, add your lye to your water slowly in a stainless steel pot and mix gently with a stainless steel spoon. Mix until fully dissolved. You'll notice it gets hot-that's okay. Set it aside until it reaches about 120 degrees F.

While you're waiting for it to cool down, heat up your olive oil in a pot. You want that at the same temp as the lye water before you add them together. Once they're both around 120 degrees F, add the lye water to the olive oil and mix with either a spoon or a whisk or a stick blender or a paddle or something, depending on how big a batch you're making.

Stir stir stir. When it begins to trace, add any fragrances or whatever you want to it, but if you're doing a basic simple soap, stick with the base ingredients. Once it's at about a medium trace, pour the soap carefully into lined mold. Cover it-if the soap doesn't reach the top of the mold, stick a thing of freezer paper on top before covering the whole thing to prevent ash. Wrap the whole shebang in a towel and let it sit somewhere for 24 hours. Unwrap it after that and unmold, cut, and line up to cure (making sure the bars aren't touching each other). In a few weeks, you'll have a nice, mild olive oil soap.
 
I would not recommend 100% olive oil soap as a first batch. It can take forever to trace, it will take forever to cure (at least four months or more), and the lather is, to my mind, thin and slimy.

You can find basic recipes on soapqueen.com or millersoap.com

25% Palm, 25% coconut and 50% olive oil will make a nice soap. If palm is hard to find or too expensive locally, you could try 30% coconut and 70% olive oil.

All soap recipes regardless of where you find them, should be run through a lye calculator. I like the one at www.soapcalc.net

A good comprehensive beginner's soap book is Alicia Grosso's The Everything Soap Book.
 
This one should be fun and easy. Lathers well too :)

50% olive oil (any kind, doesn't have to be virgin)
40% coconut oil (76 degree)
10% palm oil

run it through lye calc. to get the right amounts of water and lye. I use http://www.soapcalc.net/calc/SoapCalcWP.asp

Put your oils on the stove on low/medium heat, mix your lye (watch out for moisture in the air), don't breathe in the fumes. The smaller the recipe the less amount of time it takes for lye to cool off. You don't have to overheat your oils I bring mine to 135-140 degrees (remember, oils cool off slower than lye). If you don't feel comfortable doing lye and oils at the same time you can do lye first and when its at 140 degrees you can heat your oils then.

Mix your oils & lye at 105-107 degrees

It should trace fairly quickly, so don't stop mixing.
 
This one should be fun and easy. Lathers well too :)

50% olive oil (any kind, doesn't have to be virgin)
40% coconut oil (76 degree)
10% palm oil

Agree that it will lather up very well, but that's a lot of coconut oil.

Personally I love bubbles, but for people with normal/dry skin, it may be better to drop the coconut oil to 25- 30% range (and make up the rest with palm). Alternatively, superfat the soap at least 8 - 10% if 40% coconut oil is used.
 
Good idea!

Seifenblasen said:
This one should be fun and easy. Lathers well too :)

50% olive oil (any kind, doesn't have to be virgin)
40% coconut oil (76 degree)
10% palm oil

Agree that it will lather up very well, but that's a lot of coconut oil.

Personally I love bubbles, but for people with normal/dry skin, it may be better to drop the coconut oil to 25- 30% range (and make up the rest with palm). Alternatively, superfat the soap at least 8 - 10% if 40% coconut oil is used.
 
Seifenblasen said:
This one should be fun and easy. Lathers well too :)

50% olive oil (any kind, doesn't have to be virgin)
40% coconut oil (76 degree)
10% palm oil

Agree that it will lather up very well, but that's a lot of coconut oil.

Personally I love bubbles, but for people with normal/dry skin, it may be better to drop the coconut oil to 25- 30% range (and make up the rest with palm). Alternatively, superfat the soap at least 8 - 10% if 40% coconut oil is used.

I agree. My soaps generally have 30% coconut (or a mix of coconut and palm kernel which are chemically very similar). I superfat at 8-10%
 
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