Need Advice on my recipe

[megang000]

I have a standard recipe i really like. it's simple and yields a very nice hard bar with a good lather and feel. but im worried that some may think the ingredients inferior to fancy expensive oils and ingredients that some soap makers use. im also concerned about the controversy of using palm oil. what do you think about using these less expensive ingredients? i plan on selling my soap at local craft fairs, flea markets, and fairs.

this is my recipe.

25% canola
25% coconut oil
10% grape seed oil
35% crisco with soybean and palm oil
5% castor oil for lather

7% superfat
0.5 oz/lb fragrance
1.25:1 water:lye ratio

 

[mx5inpenn]

Honestly, most people buy based on scent first, then looks. There are people that need or want specific things from soap, like vegan or allergy issues. Those are usually the only ones that worry about ingredients. Of course, that depends on your area too, some are more "crunchy" than others. I wouldn't worry about your recipe unless you need to. I use lard in most of my soaps, never had a negative reaction to it yet. Unless you count my vegan husband.

 

[megang000]

i live in central wisconsin.... not very worried about my audience being vegan or anything. but there are some.... jw about the soap making community.

 

[shunt2011]

You've got several oils in your recipe that are extremely prone to going rancid rather quickly. Soy, grape seed and canola. Your recipe isn't really ideal. If your not opposed to lard it makes and awesome soap when combined with coconut, olive/avocado and castor. You can also sub or the lard with Palm. Just be sure to run all recipes through a lye calculator.

 

[Cindy2428]

Megan – I’m just curious about your recipe because I see some redundancy. Why are you using canola and grapeseed together? The numbers are a little off but they essentially bring the same amount of conditioning to the party. For that matter so does the Crisco.

With your cleansing numbers at 17 (pretty high for me but totally normal), I would think that the conditioning properties even with a SF of 7 would pretty much cancel each other out.

How has your testing worked out at 6 months, one year with your recipe? I very much agree with Shunt, (Shari) that your soap has a strong likelihood of turning.

How about this: SF: 5; Castor 5%, Coconut Oil 15%, Lard 50%, and Crisco 30%. Now this recipe won’t leave you a lot of playing time for fancy designs, but you will have a very simple, white, cost effective soap.

The numbers in soapcalc are by no means a rule book for your recipes, but they do provide you with some important information to take into consideration.

 

[Nao]

The standard would be upping your hard oils to at least 40-50%, and I would go with shunt's suggestion to use soy free hard oils such as palm/lard/tallow/butters/soy free shortening, especially if you want to keep the canola/grape seed oil in your recipe. I don't count coconut oil as an hard oil.

I love rapeseed (rapeseed and canola I pretty much the same thing) and include it in most of my recipes but I don't go over 15% since it tends to make the lather to slippery for my taste and it might make the soap softer. When running your recipe through your soap calculator make sure to adjust your canola/grape seed/soy amount so that the linoleic + linolenic acids doesn't go over 15%. Others have suggested this limit and I always go by that to make chances of DOS smaller.

I don't sell and really don't know how much impact label appeal have but feel free to add 5% each of a couple of luxury oils such as avocado, shea or whatever you have to increase label appeal. Your costumers likely won't notice any difference in what or how much of anything you put in your soap anyway.

Oh, seeing Cindys comment above, I wouldn't worry too much about the amount of coconut oil if you choose to keep your canola in the recipe, canola/rapeseed oil is very good at taming the aggressive nature of coconut oil.