Book Recommendations

I am looking for good soap making book recommendations. Specifically, I would really like books with good pictures and lots of great recipes. I have read the following books:

The Natural Soap Chef by Heidi Corley Barto
The Everything Soapmaking Book by Alicia Grosso
Basic Soap Making by Elizabeth Letcavage and Patsy Buck
Making Soaps & Scents by Catherine Bardey

I didn't much care for the last one, but the other three were all great.

I have seen a lot of soapers recommend The Soapmaker's Companion by Susan Miller Cavitch, but some of the reviews I read were also fairly critical. I would love to know what you all thought of that book as well as her other one, The Natural Soap Book.

Of the ones you mention, I thought Alicia Grosso's was the most useful and comprehensive. A new edition is forthcoming- with color pictures!

Cavitch's books were the first ones that I read when I began soaping. They were very informative in a lot of ways. There are lots of different recipes there - not just the same base recipe but with different additives as many soap books feature. She also discusses in detail the fatty acid profiles of different oils. I am glad that I read them and if I ever find cheap used copies, I'd probably buy them.

Here are the problems I see in her books (a reflection of when they were published)

1) she prefers stirring over stick blending - on occasion stirring makes more sense but I have better things to do with my time
2) she recommends grapefruit seed extract as a preservative or perhaps an anti-oxidant, I can't remember. It is neither. Don't waste your money.
3) she's very "all natural" and not very accepting of FOs as legitimate fragrances. Strong preference for EOs and natural colorants - clays, botanicals, etc. Although her preferences actually match mine, I think her approach is a little too rigid. I can see a place for FOs and fun colors.
4) Her recipes are very large and will have to be scaled down
5) Some have criticized her for high superfat levels, I think she uses a minimum of 10%. I don't see anything wrong with this depending on how your recipe is formulated. I use very stable oils in my base recipe - OO, PO, CO, cocoa butter and castor - and I SF at 8-10% most of the time. No DOS.

If you want a more scientific approach to soamaking, try Kevin Dunn's Scientific Soapmaking.

Hope this helps!

I agree a lot with what Judy said. I've read Cavitch's Soamaker Companion, and although there was some great info in there to be gleaned, there are also some things that have been shown to be false. When reading it, I found myself becoming increasingly irked by so much of what turned out to be nothing more than unfounded statements based purely on nothing but her own personal biases against this thing or that thing, that I am just not comfortable recommending it.

The Everything Soapmaking Book by Alicia Grosso is a much better book, and although I often recommend it because it's packed full of wonderful stuff, I do have some quibbles with it, at least with the edition I have from 2007. She makes a statement on page 102 in my edition that your soap should have a pH between 6 and 10. Hopefully, it was a typo that was removed in later editions, but there's no way a lye-based soap will ever have a pH as low as 6. Also in the edition I have, she kinda sorta lends credence in a way to an oft repeated superfatting theory that has since been debunked by Dr. Kevin Dunn. I can't fault her, though, since the edition I have came out before Dr. Dunn's experiments were published, and the theory did seem to make sense on the surface of things to so many in soapdom for a long time, but it was never actually put to the test....until Dr. Dunn came along.

Probably my most favorite soaping book is 'Scientific Soapmaking' by Dr. Kevin Dunn, but alas, you won't find any pictures or creative ideas and recipes for luscious soaps. It's awesome, though, if you want to delve deeper into the chemistry side of soapmaking.


IrishLass

IrishLass, what was the superfatting theory? I read the book recently, but I wasn't sure what you meant.

I love Soap Naturally by Patrizia Garzena and Marina Tadiello. It was my little soaping companion when I started out and I still go back to it

Thanks, Lynn. I will check it out.

Oh no! Take a look at the price! http://www.amazon.com/Soap-Naturally-In ... roduct_top

One of the reviewers says if you order the book from their site, you won't get the same book. What a shame!

Has anyone read Anne Watson's books?

danahuff said:

IrishLass, what was the superfatting theory? I read the book recently, but I wasn't sure what you meant.

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It was the, "Adding superfatting oils at trace in the hope that they will remain unsaponified' theory. Kind of a mouthful, but that's the best way I can describe it.

The theory put forth the idea that if you added a special moisturizing oil to your CP at trace right before you poured, that it would remain intact or mostly untouched by the lye as your main superfatting oil. It seems to make logical sense on the surface of things, but it turns out it was just wishful thinking at best. Here are Dr. Dunn's results from his experiments that put the theory to the test: http://cavemanchemistry.com/LyeDiscount-Dunn.pdf


IrishLass

Ah, OK, I do remember reading that, but thinking that I preferred mixing all the oils at once. Thanks! I will keep that idea regarding superfatting in mind.

danahuff said:

Oh no! Take a look at the price! http://www.amazon.com/Soap-Naturally-In ... roduct_top

One of the reviewers says if you order the book from their site, you won't get the same book. What a shame!

Click to expand...

I'm late to reply, but I ordered a whole bunch of copies from Australia of the 2009 edition. Unlike the book the Amazon reviewer got, the photos are in color, so I guess this was before the cheap re-print she was complaining about.

I ordered them from AU to distribute to my soapers group. I have leftover copies that I'm basically selling at cost, but I'm not sure if including more info would count as a advertisement. :-/

- Karen

Hibryd said:

danahuff said:

Oh no! Take a look at the price! http://www.amazon.com/Soap-Naturally-In ... roduct_top

I ordered them from AU to distribute to my soapers group. I have leftover copies that I'm basically selling at cost, but I'm not sure if including more info would count as a advertisement. :-/

- Karen

Click to expand...

Click to expand...

Yes, it would count as an Ad, you could put the Ad in The Members Ad section with a disclaimer at the top and bottom of the Ad. The rules for posting in there are at the top of the page.

danahuff said:

Oh no! Take a look at the price! http://www.amazon.com/Soap-Naturally-In ... roduct_top

One of the reviewers says if you order the book from their site, you won't get the same book. What a shame!

Has anyone read Anne Watson's books?

Click to expand...

Yes, I've read and own Anne Watson's books. I found them to be very clear and helpful when I began soaping. She does a really great job of stepping through the process. She offers a lot of recipes, all of which worked for me. She does tend towards using a lot of the more expensive oils in the recipes that call for them.

The only struggle I had with her book is that she insists we check all recipes on a lye calc. Good practice, but since she failed to give the super fat amount she wanted Calculated in tHe recipe, naturally I got a different lye amount when I checked them. It was confusing to me as a new soaper.