creating a LS recipe

Soooo, I know what I want out of a recipe when I am creating one for bar soap using NaOH, but I am curious what I need to consider (in terms of oil properties) when creating a recipe for liquid soap using KOH.

I intend to use Gracey's room temperature method because I am not a fan of cooking soap, I have purchased sodium lactate and glycerin, and have the following oils available to me: olive, coconut, palm, shea butter, castor, cocoa butter, canola (from my kitchen), and stearic acid. I have a slight preference to the look of an opaque, pearlized soap.

I intend to do a 2% SF and tend to have really dry skin. Once I find the right formula, I will be diluting this enough to use in a foaming dispenser. And, we have pretty hard water around here, so I want to make sure that there are enough bubbles.

What are the experts thoughts on this?

Coconut - 40%
palm - 25%
shea - 10%
Castor - 5%
Canola - 20%

I feel as lost about creating a LS recipe as I did 2 years ago when I started making soap. It is a whole new learning curve...

I've only made dozen batches of LS so I can only give my two cents . I would use less palm oil in recipe(under 7%). Palm oil adds body in LS but too much can cloud soap. I've made Isg's LS recipe(6% palm) and I love it! It came out crystal clear!

Read below thread before you make LS. It really helped me tremendously. By the way, this is glycerin method LS. Good luck!

http://www.soapmakingforum.com/showthread.php?t=46114

Unlike my CP batches, I haven't experimented with making a whole lot of different liquid soap formulas, so it's hard for me to judge how your proposed formula would turn out. For me, I just happened to have hit upon 2 great formulas that I really loved right off the bat, and I've pretty much stuck to them. They both use the glycerin method (as opposed to the Failor method).

One is 3bees~1flower's 65% olive oil formula (it's posted on the thread in the link Ellacho posted above) which makes a lovely, crystal clear soap; and my other formula is my tweaked version of Lily2's cocoa/shea formula (from the Dish). The latter formula makes a totally different looking soap: super rich, creamy, opaque and pearly. I've posted it elsewhere, but for convenience sake I'll post it here, too: it consists of 35% coconut, 30% castor, 20% cocoa butter, 10% olive oil and 5% refined shea butter. And I add stearic acid to it during dilution to make it 100% opaque (and which also makes it look pearly).

IrishLass

Here is a link to a post in which Irish Lass explains about the added stearic to make her LS opaque and pearly: http://www.soapmakingforum.com/showpost.php?p=448916&postcount=27

I compared the 3bees/IrishLass olive/coconut recipe that gives a clear LS with lily2/IrishLass cocoa/shea recipe that gives an opaque soap. The combination of stearic + palm is about 15% in the clear recipe and about 20% in the opaque recipe (this does not include the added stearic at dilution). Shea has unsaponifiables that might also contribute to the soap being not clear -- that's a bit of an unknown factor.

As a tentative rule of thumb, I wonder if perhaps stearic + palm under 20% might be one aspect to keep in mind when designing a recipe for a clear LS. Any thoughts from the more experienced liquid soapers?

I know all this musing is not exactly answering HoW's question, but I hope it might offer some ideas that will eventually be helpful. I'm new to designing LS recipes too, and I've done a lot of thinking about how the numbers (the soapcalc numbers, I mean) relate to a LS. Obviously hardness has no bearing, but I think the cleansing, conditioning, bubbles, and creamy lather numbers are important in a LS just as they are in a bar soap.

Since LS is already liquid and KOH makes soap even more water soluble, I suspect a LS can be somewhat more stripping to the skin than the "cleansing number" suggests. So my tentative idea is to not have an overly high cleansing number (= myristic + lauric acids), just as I avoid a high cleansing for my bar soaps.

I know some folks increase the coconut oil in LS in an effort to get more bubbles, but I have to say the 3bees/IL olive coconut recipe lathers beautifully for me. In this recipe, the cleansing number is rather low -- about 16% or so -- but the castor comes to the rescue for very nice "bubbly" and "creamy" numbers in the mid 20s.

Just musing....

Muse away, Deanna!

I made the 3bees~1flower formula last night and finished diluting it today. I found that I needed around 65% water to dilute, not 75%, so that was interesting.

I've been thinking alot about the other formula which gives a pearlized soap with the addition of stearic acid.

I know Irish Lass adds it at the end, but I have been thinking a lot about how to add it up front and save a step. (I am a very lazy soaper - anything to avoid a step and have fewer dishes to wash!)

So, please let me know if I have missed a step in my math.

The original formula is:

Coconut Oil 35%
Castor Oil 30%
Cocoa Butter 20%
Olive Oil 10%
Shea Butter 5%

Translating this into a 1 pound batch (weight of oils):

Coconut Oil 5.6 oz
Castor Oil 4.8 oz
Cocoa Butter 3.2 oz
Olive Oil 1.6 oz
Shea Butter .8 oz

KOH 3.47 oz
Glycerin - 10.4 oz

This gives a paste weight of 29.87 oz.

At the dilution rate of .41, that gives 12.24 oz water, plus .89 oz of sodium lactate. This gives a total batch weight of 43 oz. 2% of 43 is .86 oz of stearic acid.

This would be 5.6% of the oil weight.


Thoughts?

Where's the stearic acid?

Or did you mean sodium lactate?

Whoops, the 2% of 43 oz is the stearic, giving .86 oz.

I've corrected the previous post.

The problem with adding stearic up front is that it is going to be turned into soap -- potassium stearate. A fatty acid will react very quickly and easily with the lye (whether KOH or NaOH) and you just can't count on it staying as just the fatty acid. Adding stearic acid at dilution means it will remain as the fatty acid, not become soap.

So the bottom line is when you add the stearic acid is important and is likely to give you two different end products. Faith (fgoriold) has experimented with this when making cream soap (a soap made with both lyes, has less water than LS but more water than CP/HP, contains high stearic like shaving soap, often whipped to a fluffy consistency). If I remember correctly, she saw a significant difference in texture between the cream soaps made with stearic up front vs. stearic added later.