Testing out creating recipes; need advice

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leahjo534

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I created a recipe on Soapee packed full of the most common oils and butters. This is my first time creating a recipe amd I need some experienced opinions on it.
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Can you let us know your reasoning for the recipe? What are you trying to achieve, and how does each ingredient help you to do that?

I ask because it looks like a recipe based on oils and butters which are good for the skin - as oils and butters. But will the same be the case when they have saponified? Or will the end result be a bit of a disappointing soap? A case being, you have almost 50% of the recipe as butters of various sorts and using a lot of butters in a soap can make it feel quite "draggy" on the skin and suppress the lather to a degree
 
I can tell you right now that after the 3rd time you make that recipe you’re going to hate it just because of the number of ingredients you are using.

The majority of the ‘benefits’ that an oil or butter has is lost during the saponification process. If I put cocoa butter in a lotion recipe it’s still cocoa butter, but when you put it in soap recipe, it’s no longer cocoa butter, it’s soap.
 
Aside from what has already been said about the variety of oils, I note that you have a lot of hard oils, and the main liquid oil you have is pomace olive oil, which is known to accelerate trace.

I would expect this recipe to need very little, if any, stick blending. I think it's likely get to a thick trace sooner than you expect. If you're lucky (and careful with temps), it'll be possible to pour it into a mould, but if you're unlucky it might be a plop and glop technique...
 
This is the fun part when you start making your own recipes. Your brain is going to be full of ideas! This is why I liked my little 16 oz mold so much-- if I had an idea, I could try it out with a small number of bars. Just enough to try and to share with a couple of friends.

As for this particular recipe, I think it sounds expensive. Also, you will not be able to tell what you like about any one ingredient. So, I would probably just use one of those butters at about 10-20% in an otherwise "normal" recipe to see what I think.
 
Are you aware what aloe and avocado “butters” are?
Aloe butter is coconut oil infused with aloe vera. In case you want less than 28% of coconut oil in your soap, you would have to cut down the CO, or use aloe vera juice as an aqueous liquid for your lye, instead of the expensive lifestyle accessory that is aloe butter.
Avocado butter is a blend of avocado oil and some hydrogenated vegetable oil. It appears in soap calculators, but do manufacturers adhere to these? Do all manufacturers use the same recipe? What when you decide to switch supplier at some time? Using processed ingredients (particularly those that aren't made for soap) adds further unknonws into your (already quite lenghty) equation.
 
It is possible to get avocado butter. Aloe butter not so much.

I don't know if you would get tired of weighing all the oils in this recipe or not, but I would simplify it. Although, the only way you will know is to make a small test batch and see what you think. Without knowing what qualities you are looking for in your soap, it's a little hard to give you advice. I think you are looking to make a soap that is vegan and palm free, but beyond that it's hard to tell.
 
First, I'd like to point out that this may be a very fast-moving recipe, and as a beginner, you may find yourself with soap-on-a-stick before you have a chance to put it into the soap mold. Pomace olive oil moves really fast, in my experience, in the first place. But when you add the additional heat needed to keep all those hard oils melted, then add the lye and even more heat builds up, and a stick blender to incorporate the oils and lye... Well, soap-on-a-Stick Blender. I would advise against over-stick blending, which is really hard to avoid when you are a beginner. You will likely have no time to add a color and I would also advise choosing any fragrance very carefully to avoid one that accelerates trace!

And also, as someone who has made soap with as many oils in the formula as you have in this one, I have to agree with what has been said. However, it is something new soapers sometimes do and need to learn on their own about making complex formulas.

Aloe butter is not a true butter, so that's a real money waster, in my opinion. If you already purchased it, I would recommend not using it in soap, but in or as a stand-alone leave-on product (just rub it into your skin as is, for example.) I'd rather just buy some Aloe juice and make my lye solution with that, as it lends a nice feel to the soap, as well as supporting a bubbly lather.

Avocado butter, if you purchased true avocado butter (& I'm not sure where it's sold, as I couldn't find any today when I did a search), would be a rather expensive ingredient in soap, but if you want to try it, that is your choice to make.

I have used jojoba wax in soap, and IME it seems to add something my skin likes in a wintertime soap, especially if you normally have very dry skin in the winter. The rest of the year, it's really not necessary for my skin, so I really don't use it very much in soap.

I do use Cocoa Butter & Shea in combination, and that seems to be a fairly common practice. They seem to work well together, IMO. I tend to stick to these 2 butters rather than mixing a bunch in the same recipe, although I have tried substituting others now and then, when I had them. I personally didn't notice a hug difference if any when I did.
 
If I saw this recipe online somewhere, I wouldn't even look twice at it. Way too many ingredients. I want to keep my recipes simple so that it doesn't take me forever to make a batch of soap AND I don't have to worry about the shelf life of the oils if I don't soap on a regular basis. It took me a long time of using other people's recipes to realize that my skin does not like olive oil. Changing one ingredient at a time might take you years to find out what is wrong or right about this soap (considering curing time in the process). I think it is easier to start with a simple recipe and then tweak it to add another oil or butter to see if you like the results better.
 

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