Liquid Soap Happiness

Soapmaking Forum

Help Support Soapmaking Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.
I've been doing a lot of reading and a little making this week. I'm unhappy with two batches but am absolutely thrilled with this one. It's made with beef tallow, olive, and canola oil and it's really lovely. The lather is fast and abundant... really nice. I'm smitten. I think I will thicken it a bit as it's a bit on the runny side and then I just need to decide what I to fragrance it with.

20230205_154254_HDR.jpg
 
I've been doing a lot of reading and a little making this week. I'm unhappy with two batches but am absolutely thrilled with this one. It's made with beef tallow, olive, and canola oil and it's really lovely. The lather is fast and abundant... really nice. I'm smitten. I think I will thicken it a bit as it's a bit on the runny side and then I just need to decide what I to fragrance it with.
Is this one of the Ultimate recipes, and if so, which one, please? I may have to give it a go. I have lots and lots of tallow on hand at the moment, and don't think I've ever used it in liquid soap. :)
 
@Misschief it took me roughly a week to realize i wasn't going to receive a book in the mail from Ashley Green, but now that I've dug into it, wow, this ebook is pretty great. I've never seen nothing like it.
Geez i didnt realize how much i don't know. Appreciate that rec, & aye @Zany_in_CO... that Failor book was also just what i was seeking. I learned way more in 75 pages of easy reading than I expected; one idea in particular i just can't stop thinking about...
 
Last edited:
I've become a little obsessed with making the 30-minute Hi Temp liquid soaps. It's almost as much fun as making soap! These are three that I made that contain animal fats. One is with beef tallow, one with lard, and one with emu oil. The emu oil soap is my own recipe. I have one more batch of liquid soap to bottle tomorrow, made with hemp oil.

Liquid x3.png
 
Those look great. What'd u use for color? I heard Greemu oil is just as good as Emu oil.
I had to buy & read the ug2CP before I finished ug2LS bc during the read I realized I'm not so much of a master soapmaker as I thought.
Now i need to make more bar soap & arguing w myself whether to use citric acid & sugar and sub babassu for coconut, but Sam's doesn't sell babassu...
 
Those look great. What'd u use for color? I heard Greemu oil is just as good as Emu oil.
I had to buy & read the ug2CP before I finished ug2LS bc during the read I realized I'm not so much of a master soapmaker as I thought.
Now i need to make more bar soap & arguing w myself whether to use citric acid & sugar and sub babassu for coconut, but Sam's doesn't sell babassu...
I haven't read the ebook only because I prefer physical books. I also want to know how @Misschief colored these. I'm not sure why I thought you couldn't (assuming because I read about mica not being a good choice), but I didn't know AC could be used to color liquid soap! My BFF would be over the moon if I made a black liquid soap! What color is the lather? Tell me white and I think I'll be buying an ebook! 🤣
As for CP ingredients: Citric acid doesn't really change anything for me personally, but if I ever choose to sell, I will absolutely use CA because I don't know what my customers' water quality is and would hate for them to suddenly be dealing with soap scrum. Sugar definitely increases lather, but I tend to add sugar in the form of homemade aloe gel because it's easy, has more label appeal, and I can truly feel the difference after washing with it. As for babassu, I don't find much difference in my recipes than when using coconut. It is slightly more cleansing/stripping than coconut but otoh, it's less comedogenic if you are superfatting at a high rate like in salt bars. Babassu is nice to have on hand for those allergic to coconut just to have the option, but I honestly find that most who are allergic/sensitive to coconut will also shy away from babassu because of the close relationship of the two and tend to gravitate more to animal based or castile recipes.
 
Last edited:
@Servant4Christ that’s exactly why I started using citric acid - bc my sister has suuuuper hard well water from the California foothills - picture dark mineral stains on every toilet bc she gave up on scrubbing them daily to prevent buildup (I don’t blame her).

As much as I’d l prefer not to have an extra ingredient in my soap room and on my labels, I did switch to sodium citrate. It is so much easier to dissolve and keep dissolved, plus no extra lye calculation is needed, plus I don’t get the same weird reactions and crystallization that CA sometimes caused.

Also, now that I use it all the time, even with our soft water, I do like the decreased scum and the easier lathering of soap with a chelator in it. 😊

I will admit to coveting your free and local aloe supply. Love the feel of aloe in soaps!
 
Those look great. What'd u use for color? I heard Greemu oil is just as good as Emu oil.
I had to buy & read the ug2CP before I finished ug2LS bc during the read I realized I'm not so much of a master soapmaker as I thought.
Now i need to make more bar soap & arguing w myself whether to use citric acid & sugar and sub babassu for coconut, but Sam's doesn't sell babassu...
I hear you! Even just going through the UG2LS, I've started studying the fatty acid profiles of oils, going so far as to create a graph with them so I can see what various recipe FA profiles look like and using that to create my own recipes. Then I bought the HP book so I could compare optimum FA profiles between liquid and HP soaps. All this by someone who failed Chem 11..... twice!

The orange soap isn't coloured; it's made with red palm oil. For the others, I have some liquid soap colours that work very well. I have another soap I just bottled yesterday and it's naturally coloured by the hemp oil; it's the 30-min Hemp HTLS recipe from the book.

20230303_071827_HDR.jpg
 
I haven't read the ebook only because I prefer physical books. I also want to know how @Misschief colored these. I'm not sure why I thought you couldn't (assuming because I read about mica not being a good choice), but I didn't know AC could be used to color liquid soap! My BFF would be over the moon if I made a black liquid soap! What color is the lather? Tell me white and I think I'll be buying an ebook! 🤣
The lather is white. ;)

I use liquid soap colorants that I ordered from Voyageur. They're the liquid jewel tones and they work great in the LS but you do need to work with the natural colour of the soap. It's generally on the yellow side and that will affect the coloring.
 
@Servant4Christ that’s exactly why I started using citric acid - bc my sister has suuuuper hard well water from the California foothills - picture dark mineral stains on every toilet bc she gave up on scrubbing them daily to prevent buildup (I don’t blame her).

As much as I’d l prefer not to have an extra ingredient in my soap room and on my labels, I did switch to sodium citrate. It is so much easier to dissolve and keep dissolved, plus no extra lye calculation is needed, plus I don’t get the same weird reactions and crystallization that CA sometimes caused.

Also, now that I use it all the time, even with our soft water, I do like the decreased scum and the easier lathering of soap with a chelator in it. 😊

I will admit to coveting your free and local aloe supply. Love the feel of aloe in soaps!
Forgive my ignorance, but I thought citric acid and sodium citrate we're the same thing. Or is it that CA turns to sodium citrate during saponification? Ugh, I might need another cup of coffee because my brain is sluggish this morning.
 

Latest posts

Back
Top