Please critique my recipe!

[Orchidgirl]

Hi there,

I've been soaping for 2.5 years, and although I love this hobby and currently make up enough soap to keep up with my family's needs, I find it pretty tough to fit soaping into my schedule. So, I'm trying to come up with a basic recipe that I can perhaps weigh up ahead of time so that the oils are "ready to go" whenever I find myself with some spare time on my hands to make soap.

Here's my current recipe. I like the way it lathers, and it seems to have just the right amount of cleansing for my skin. It does seem to dissolve a bit quicker than I'd like in the shower, though, plus it seems to stay rather soft/sticky for quite a while during cure (maybe due to the somewhat high castor oil percentage?) So, I was thinking of tinkering with it some.

10% almond oil
10% castor oil
25% coconut oil
25% olive oil
30% palm oil

I use the full water amount that's the default setting on soapcalc for all my recipes, and I superfat at 5%. And I add ~1 tsp of sodium lactate to the cooled lye water, as well.

Do you think that diminishing the % of the almond and castor oils and adding in a hard butter, like cocoa or shea, might be a good idea to help the soap survive in the shower longer and be firmer right after unmolding? These two ingredients are rather "exotic" in my neck of the woods, and have to be ordered online, which is why I haven't tried them before.

Thanks for any advice!

 

[Obsidian]

It is a bit low in hard oils, maybe something like this would work better.

palm 45%
olive oil 25%
coconut 25%
castor 5%

or if you want a butter

palm 35%
shea 10%
olive 25%
coconut 25%
castor 5%

 

[Orchidgirl]

Thanks, Obsidian. So the almond oil is kind of unnecessary, I gather?

I will try your suggested version with the shea butter. One last question: for the purpose of making the bar harder, are the shea and cocoa butters basically interchangeable? (I realize I'd need to run them thru soapcalc b/c of different SAP values).

 

[Obsidian]

Coco butter will make a harder soap but shea makes a better soap in my opinion. Use which ever you think you'd like best or even a combo of both.
Almond is a nice oil but too me, many of the liquid oils are similar enough to olive that it just doesn't make sense to use both. Of course you can still use the almond if you want, just use it in place of some of the OO.
I try to use as few oils as possible to simplify things and if you are ok with using animal fats, lard instead of palm will help with hardness and make a amazing soap. I use 50% lard in my soaps.

 

[Orchidgirl]

Thanks for your insight. I will try the shea butter version you suggested very soon!