This post is mainly to upset the apple cart, because it seems that as a community we have grown complacent in accepting certain beliefs about how to formulate soap.
The worst thing that has happened is the acceptance of Soapcalc qualities as the primary tool for predicting the outcome of a certain oil formulation. These numbers, arrived at by some simple arithmetic, represent just one simplistic idea about what to expect from a recipe. That idea is the tail wagging the dog.
Some people might take it less seriously than others or have discovered new things, but look around at how much those numbers are quoted. As a group, we give that system way more credence than it deserves. Newbies get hooked on it. At this point I think it's become an impediment to learning more because we don't think enough beyond it.
First off, I suggest that the "conditioning" quality people look so closely at is nonsense. Useless. As an indication of recipe mildness, adding up the percentage of unsaturated fatty acids is, pure and simple, wrong.
What these numbers are blinding people to is learning how the proportions of different fatty acids interact to determine soap qualities. For instance, we talk about certain drying effects being proportional to the amount of coconut or other lauric oil in the recipe. Then we marvel at how wildly different people are in their reaction to it. Why would we assume that people are that different when at least a portion of it could be explained by other differences in the soaps?
People have given me soaps to try with a known formula. For instance, one with 20% coconut oil to keep it mild, but a relatively soft recipe that includes some amount of a linoleic oil. I wash my hands thoroughly and dry them. Wait 10 minutes and do it again. Flex my fingers and my skin feels tighter. Obviously a drying soap.
However, I can make a harder soap that's lower in unsaturated fatty acids but significantly higher in lauric oil. It's so non-drying that I cheerfully use it to wash my face. Am I two different people with different sensitivities to coconut oil? No, it's just two different recipes. And guess what? The one with higher "cleansing" and lower "conditioning" is by far the milder soap.
Forget those numbers and free your mind.