soap a little....flakey......

[topofmurrayhill]

This is terrific, thank you! I'll work on making a similar chart for myself in Excel! Although I wouldn't complain TOO bitterly if you felt inclined to share yours. . .

Can you recommend a good online resource that provides the kind of classification of oils that you mentioned? Although SoapCalc gives a breakdown of each oil's composition, it doesn't provide classification or the mono/poly breakdown. Just sat and unsat. Unless I'm missing something?

Click on an oil in Soapcalc, then look at the fatty acids on the lower left. Check out the oils I mentioned in my post as examples: coconut oil, palm oil, shea butter, olive oil, soybean oil, flax seed oil. Some oils might be a little ambiguous, but most will be fairly easy to categorize using those as examples.

You might notice that some of the liquid oils have a linoleic and an oleic version (like sunflower and safflower), the latter being created by breeding or whatnot. You can consider those to be two entirely different oils for soaping purposes, even though they come from the same species. The oleic versions in particular can be useful for soaping.

 

[JBot]

Click on an oil in Soapcalc, then look at the fatty acids on the lower left. Check out the oils I mentioned in my post as examples: coconut oil, palm oil, shea butter, olive oil, soybean oil, flax seed oil. Some oils might be a little ambiguous, but most will be fairly easy to categorize using those as examples.

Ok, so I'm looking at these, and coconut and olive are pretty obvious. But the ones that are more ambiguous, how can I categorize them? Additional googling? Shea butter shows 40 stearic and 48 oleic. . .but that's a stearic oil? How would I know that just by looking at these numbers, since the oleic is actually higher?

Does SoapCalc provide the mono/poly breakdown (I haven't been able to find it there), or are you getting those figures somewhere else?

 

[topofmurrayhill]

Ok, so I'm looking at these, and coconut and olive are pretty obvious. But the ones that are more ambiguous, how can I categorize them? Additional googling? Shea butter shows 40 stearic and 48 oleic. . .but that's a stearic oil? How would I know that just by looking at these numbers, since the oleic is actually higher?

Does SoapCalc provide the mono/poly breakdown (I haven't been able to find it there), or are you getting those figures somewhere else?

Soapcalc doesn't do that calculation, but you can look at the fatty acids. Oleic is mono (C18:1), linoleic and linolenic are poly (C18:2, C18:3). My Excel workbook has an oils database and everything is calculated from that.

The categories aren't too important. They're just handy sometimes for referring to a certain kind of oil.

Here's a selection of veggie oils sorted by lauric percentage, with the lauric oils unambiguously at the top. We don't have to sort by palmitic, because palm is the one standout. Clearly no coincidence that palmitic acid is named after palm.

Next we can sort by stearic. All the tropical butters rise to the top. Even though they have high proportions of other fatty acids such as oleic, the purpose of these oils in a veggie recipe is to be a source of stearic. You can think of it that way.

We can sort the remaining oils by iodine number and we get the oleic oils on top and linoleic or linolenic oils down below. Where to draw the line? Not every oil strictly needs to be categorized, but you might think of the highlighted ones as more or less the oleic oils. After that, the polyunsaturates tend to be at least double.