Of all the single-oil soaps people have made, here's one you probably haven't seen -- meadowfoam oil soap! I had some left over and had nothing better to do with it.
Other single-oil soaps are composed of fatty acids we are familiar with, and their properties are often predictable. Meadowfoam oil is composed mostly of fatty acids that don't exist in our normal soaping oils.
For instance, the "soft" part of ordinary oils is composed of 18-carbon monounsaturated oleic acid (abbreviated C18:1 and typical of olive oil) and 18-carbon polyunsaturated linoleic acid (C18:2, typical of soybean oil). In contrast, meadowfoam oil contains C20:1 monounsaturated fatty acid along with some C22:1 monounsaturated and C22:2 polyunsaturated fatty acids. These longer-chain fatty acids create mystery soap that we aren't familiar with.
I used cold-pressed meadowfoam oil from MMS, which has a yellow color to it. This produced a vivid yellow soap batter. The soap is yellowish too, but much lighter. It has a unique and very nice herbal fragrance to it.
Trace took forever. I literally only had enough oil to make this one bar of soap, so there was no way to stick blend without spraying the batter everywhere. After being driven to whisking despair, I finally resorted to putting a few drops of clove oil in the batter to help it along. This accelerated things from impossibly slow to only painfully slow. But eventually the batter reached trace.
Tracing behavior might remind one of olive oil, but the soap actually became rock hard by the next day. It's a little over a week old now. I planed a few slices off last night to try out at the sink and the soap even sounded hard being shaved by the planer.
Hard and somewhat brittle as the soap might be, the slices got creamy soft fairly quickly in contact with water. Lather was extremely thin -- hardly any bubbles or foam. It's a gentle soap and skin feel was fine after using it, but it did nothing miraculous.
Other single-oil soaps are composed of fatty acids we are familiar with, and their properties are often predictable. Meadowfoam oil is composed mostly of fatty acids that don't exist in our normal soaping oils.
For instance, the "soft" part of ordinary oils is composed of 18-carbon monounsaturated oleic acid (abbreviated C18:1 and typical of olive oil) and 18-carbon polyunsaturated linoleic acid (C18:2, typical of soybean oil). In contrast, meadowfoam oil contains C20:1 monounsaturated fatty acid along with some C22:1 monounsaturated and C22:2 polyunsaturated fatty acids. These longer-chain fatty acids create mystery soap that we aren't familiar with.
I used cold-pressed meadowfoam oil from MMS, which has a yellow color to it. This produced a vivid yellow soap batter. The soap is yellowish too, but much lighter. It has a unique and very nice herbal fragrance to it.
Trace took forever. I literally only had enough oil to make this one bar of soap, so there was no way to stick blend without spraying the batter everywhere. After being driven to whisking despair, I finally resorted to putting a few drops of clove oil in the batter to help it along. This accelerated things from impossibly slow to only painfully slow. But eventually the batter reached trace.
Tracing behavior might remind one of olive oil, but the soap actually became rock hard by the next day. It's a little over a week old now. I planed a few slices off last night to try out at the sink and the soap even sounded hard being shaved by the planer.
Hard and somewhat brittle as the soap might be, the slices got creamy soft fairly quickly in contact with water. Lather was extremely thin -- hardly any bubbles or foam. It's a gentle soap and skin feel was fine after using it, but it did nothing miraculous.
