Liquid Soap with minimal hard oils
- Thread starter MommaSoap
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You certainly can. A low coconut recipe might not lather the way you prefer, but there's no reason why you can't make that kind of liquid soap. Many liquid soap recipes don't use any of the fats high in palmitic and stearic acids (that would be palm, lard, tallow, and the butters.)
Many bar soap makers assume you can just recalculate a bar soap recipe for use with KOH rather than NaOH, but that's not always the best approach to making a good LS recipe. If you're new to liquid soap making, you might want to define your goals for the liquid soap (sensitive skin, general handwashing and bathing, dishwashing, etc.), come up with a preliminary recipe, and get some feedback from us about the recipe.
Many bar soap makers assume you can just recalculate a bar soap recipe for use with KOH rather than NaOH, but that's not always the best approach to making a good LS recipe. If you're new to liquid soap making, you might want to define your goals for the liquid soap (sensitive skin, general handwashing and bathing, dishwashing, etc.), come up with a preliminary recipe, and get some feedback from us about the recipe.
Thank you so much! I usually make hp soap. I've made several liquid soaps but they never lather well enough for me to make them into a body wash so I am trying to introduce castor oil back into my recipes to see if that will help. But right now I use 30% hard oils like lard, coconut or red palm but all they do is clean I just want to make a nice natural bubbly LS.
Castor won’t add to the lather, it stabilizes it. CO is what give lather.
I agree with Shari that castor is a lather stabilizer, not a lather creator. Higher castor recipes might perform very nicely for you, but I wouldn't assume lots of castor will necessarily improve the lather.
Castor helps make the liquid soap more clear, if clarity is important to you. That's the main reason why some liquid soap recipes have a much higher % of castor than typical bar soap recipes.
Using a high percentage of coconut is a more common solution to get liquid soap (LS) to lather faster and more abundantly But I'm not always so sure it's a good solution if for no other reason than a high coconut oil soap is drying to the skin. And you can't compensate by using a high superfat in LS as you could if making a bar soap -- anything more than a small amount of superfat will just separate out of the diluted LS.
A big reason why liquid soap often doesn't foam well is that a lot of time the LS is too concentrated coming out of the bottle to lather well. And many people use too much LS because pumping that bottle is a habit. If using a bar of soap, it's a whole lot more work to get the same amount of soap on your skin as you can from a pump or three of LS.
If you are diluting only enough to get the thickness you want, the LS is very likely going to lather slowly until there's enough water mixed into the soap from the faucet or your bath cloth to let the lather build. I get a quicker lather if I dilute the soap to a lower "pure soap" concentration -- in other words there's already more water in the soap coming out of the bottle, so it lathers quicker on the washcloth or in the hand.
Castor helps make the liquid soap more clear, if clarity is important to you. That's the main reason why some liquid soap recipes have a much higher % of castor than typical bar soap recipes.
Using a high percentage of coconut is a more common solution to get liquid soap (LS) to lather faster and more abundantly But I'm not always so sure it's a good solution if for no other reason than a high coconut oil soap is drying to the skin. And you can't compensate by using a high superfat in LS as you could if making a bar soap -- anything more than a small amount of superfat will just separate out of the diluted LS.
A big reason why liquid soap often doesn't foam well is that a lot of time the LS is too concentrated coming out of the bottle to lather well. And many people use too much LS because pumping that bottle is a habit. If using a bar of soap, it's a whole lot more work to get the same amount of soap on your skin as you can from a pump or three of LS.
If you are diluting only enough to get the thickness you want, the LS is very likely going to lather slowly until there's enough water mixed into the soap from the faucet or your bath cloth to let the lather build. I get a quicker lather if I dilute the soap to a lower "pure soap" concentration -- in other words there's already more water in the soap coming out of the bottle, so it lathers quicker on the washcloth or in the hand.
Zany_in_CO
Saponifier
I made 100% sweet almond oil shampoo as a special request from a customer. I was skeptical at first that it wouldn't lather well, but it did. The key to lather, to my mind at least, is to find the optimum amount of dilution water. In this case, I used 15-20% soap to 80-85% water. I also subbed glycerin for water to make the KOH solution in order to speed up trace and cook. NOT recommended for beginners because the glycerin gets extremely hot, and if over-heated, gives off toxic fumes. It's safer to use glycerin as part of your water as shown in this tutorial:
LS Tutorials, testing & lowering pH
http://alaiynab.blogspot.com/search/label/tutorial
Here's another helpful link
What to Expect from Various Oils in LS
https://www.soapmakingforum.com/threads/what-to-expect-from-various-oils-in-ls.62864/
TIP: Using a bath pouf makes my LS lather like a mad dog!
LS Tutorials, testing & lowering pH
http://alaiynab.blogspot.com/search/label/tutorial
Here's another helpful link
What to Expect from Various Oils in LS
https://www.soapmakingforum.com/threads/what-to-expect-from-various-oils-in-ls.62864/
TIP: Using a bath pouf makes my LS lather like a mad dog!
