How to list lye in recipe?

[Shazzer]

Hi all!
I live in Europe, and am a little confused about how to write out recipes to get them safety certified (here, you can't even gift soap legally without them being certified by a lab). I have to list ALL ingredients as % of mass. So I started listing my usual oil rates, etc ... But then I started questioning if I'm doing it right. And how does lye convert to a % of the overall recipe? The oils are all calculated only as % of the total oil weight.... Water is then calculated as a % related to the oil weight.... The amount of lye you need isn't calculated that way though, it's calculated based on saponification rates of each oil in the recipe.... So how do I list it?! And do I need to convert the oil % to the % of the TOTAL weight, not just the oil weight??? Can anyone who has done this in Europe before help me out?

 

[The Efficacious Gentleman]

You don't need to even label soap for giving it away in Europe. It might be a country specific rule, but not EU wide.

As for labelling, it's not something that you have to do to get certified, but it is part of the process. Use the inci names for the saponified oils - look at a soap that you have and you'll not see lye listed, but rather things like "sodium olivate" which is the actual soap that is made by mixing olive oil and sodium hydroxide.

Check out the business section of the forum, especially anything that mentions EU or certification in the title - it's a gold mine

 

[Shazzer]

Thanks for the tip! I will hunt more through the business forum for sure. I see you're located in Austria, I'm in Germany. All I can say is there is constant debate around the whole gift giving thing, but strictly speaking that is actually 'inverkehrbringen' and therefore subject to all the same rules. And, at least here, most people take it seriously.

Also when listing the ingredients, I looked at a bunch of other small businesses but they use the usual oil INCIs and list 'sodium hydroxide" separately. I only found one who does it as you explain, so that made me hesitate... But if I did it that way, then the % stay the same and it just doesn't get listed separately?

 

[The Efficacious Gentleman]

Exactly - you can list the "sodium xxx" in the order of the amount of oils in the recipe.

Liebe Grüße aus Vorarlberg