How many base recipes do you use?

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How many base recipes do you use?

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mcleodnaturals

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I'm just curious if people have one or two base recipes that they use and then customize with scents and colors and additives. I seem to have a different recipe for each type of soap and I can't seem to find my favorite!
 
I only use 2, simply because the cost of alot of oils get expensive. I keep it simple.. :)
 
i have 3 basic ones. one for my men's scented soaps they can use higher cleansing and lower conditioning formulas,
( men are very hard on soap and they need a bar that is rock hard like concrete so it lasts them more then 7 showers. or at least that is how it works at our house. coarse if i could convince them that using a poufee is not an unmanly thing to do, so they are washing with the lather instead of the poor bar of soap would make it last longer.)

where as the women's fu-fu fragranced soaps i make, tend to favor more mature skin types and have more conditioning, because that is what i like. a fragrance that i consider family all purpose will fall inbetween the other two formulas.

i don't count the speciality soaps, like kitchen soaps, hard working but gentle. gardener's & mechanic soaps just tweaked abit from the above kitchen soap formula.
a bastille soap
an unscented mid range bar that most everyone could use.

doesn't mean i don't change them up a bit by using heavy cream and aloe instead of goats milk or buttermilk from time to time. or change out palm for lard. i don't do this to fool the customer, i just like to shake it up now and then. first time customers usually make their purchase based on scent first, color scent and ingredients thirdly if they even read the label.

but i still disclose what is in each bar. and have signs that say our soaps may pr may not contain animal oils. if it is a concern please check label before purchase.

i get pretty annoyed when i want to buy a soap from someone else and they don't list the ingredients.

that got a little off the subject didn't it. sorry.

guess i could clarify this, they all use the same basic oils pretty much, it is just the percentages that change so they do their own thing.
 
I have 3 or 4. The 2 main ones are high in oleic for younger skin, the other has more linoleic for mature skin. The third one is a combo recipe that has equal numbers for those 2 acids, and a conditioning number of 58.

I have these recipes in veggie and in animal fats.

Paul :wink:
 
My answer is very similar to Barb's. I favour one recipe for veggie soaps, another for animal fats (usually the shaving bars), and occasionally I like to try a different oil just for fun....like sesame ( customer requested it). For this I simply removed 5 ounces of my main olive oil, and put in 5 ounces of sesame; reviewed the recipe in my SoapMaker calc and I now have hundreds of recipes stored in my database.
 
Being that I am very new to soapmaking, I stick to one basic 3 oil recipe. Sometimes I sub out lard for the palm oil. I have experimented with a bit of Mango butter or a bit of shea...and I am consistently adding a small amount of castor oil with the OO now. There are so many variables that I can play with in this learning process...colorants, additives, milks, gelling, not gelling....I think it will be a long while before I start getting fancy with the oils. I am just a hobbyist at this point, so I have a long way to go!!
 
La Oberhasli said:
I generally have one recipe and adjust depending on what I have available etc.
Would you mind sharing your base recipewith me?? I want one that i can add things to and that i can use all the time insteadof creating new ones etc...
x
 
I have three base recipies but of course various combos of additives...

two of them are basically the same except one is beef tallow and the other is palm

the third recipe produces a very soft soap, but necessary for the sensitive skin sect. The recipe says it has a conditioning of 60 on soapcalc, but only a cleansing of 13... it is only 15% coconutt oil

Having only three recipes makes it easier to make up big batches of the oil the way that paul does....
 

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