There are two things you need to do here to get harder, long-lasting bars.
(1) These are simply not very hard recipes. I find the lard out there really doesn't have hardening properties equal to palm oil, so in that first recipe
you need more lard. In the second recipe you aren't using any hardening oils except for the shea butter. I think you've got the right idea there if you are trying to avoid palm oil. You're just going to need a lot more shea butter. If you didn't have any problem with the 15%, then try 25% and take it out of the olive or avocado. Besides, if you want to call it a shea butter soap, let's get serious about it and make it live up to the name. You can keep the coconut oil as is to preserve the lather along with the castor. But it needs to be backed up by hard oils to avoid being a little harsh.
(2) If you are curing in a humid environment, you need a head start on getting rid of moisture. Best way is not to put it in in the first place. Set the
lye calculator to a
33% or higher lye concentration and it will transport you 2 weeks into the future as far as drying time goes. Certainly the more drying time you give it the longer it will last. That hopefully needn't take months and months. If you
weigh one bar periodically you'll see when the weight loss from drying levels off.
Yep, yep, yep. I am a lardy; and unashamed. My recipes range from 50% lard to 40% lard depending on how much "luxury" oils I add to it. The majority of the time it is 45% with 10% "luxury" oil. I occasionally make a 100% lard bar, too. That's a nice bar of soap. I leave that fragrance and color free; just lard, water and NaOH.
I soap at 2:1 (33.333%) concentration and it is my comfort zone. I can adjust up or down if needed. I use a master batched 1:1 lye solution, which makes it much easier to deal with, especially if I want to alter some of the liquid. The extra water can just be aloe juice or milk or whatever may be. (I used to master batch at 2:1, but when I wanted to change out the liquid, I had to make fresh solution.)
Using salt can help with the hardness of the bar, too. Personally, I like using vinegar in my soap to produce a hard bar, but that's tricky and you'll have to do math to figure out how much vinegar:NaOH to use. I suck at math, so it was hard for me to "get it" but TOMH was patient and taught me well. (LisaAnne was the real breakthrough for me, though.) Here are a couple of threads to read through regarding the use of vinegar in your soap. It was a challenge at first, but once you get the hang of it, you'll really love the process. (
http://www.soapmakingforum.com/showthread.php?t=57991) and (
http://www.soapmakingforum.com/showthread.php?t=59148 see LisaAnne's post #37)
It is hot and humid here and I don't have central a/c. The room I keep my soap in has a fan to circulate the air better and the window & door are kept closed; but the humidity still makes the soaps weep. It also makes curing longer in the heat of the summer because there is too much water in the air to allow the water in the soap to evaporate. I have started weighing four bars per batch and recording those weights. I usually weigh every other week. I've gone as long as four weeks. Once I get the same weight on all four bars three times in a row, I'm satisfied that there isn't going to be anymore water evaporation and put them in a box to finish curing. I like to cure for six months, but that's just me. Although, I certainly do use younger soap;
I've discovered (pretty much by accident) that my particular recipe does best with a long cure.
This last sentence, for me, is very important. That could be something you should consider. I am no expert by any stretch of the imagination. I have only been soaping for a little over a year. Last year, when I made my first batches of soap, I thought they were really good. I liked them. I was lucky, I figured out a formula that was good for my particular skin right out of the gate. I've been using it since. I made my first batch of soap in April of 2015 and several more quickly followed.
Around Christmas time, I had a bag of "first soaps" in my bathroom cabinet. I ran out of the bar I had been using, so I grabbed one of those. The soap, which was about 6 or 7 months old by then, was absolutely amazing! It was a thousand times better than it was when I first made it and much better than anything on my shelves at the moment. I went to my computer to check the recipe. It was the exact same recipe I was currently using. Wow! Old soap is the best.
The soaps I have in the shower are in a mesh thing that you're supposed to hang over the closet door and store shoes in. Most of those things are plastic now, but if you can find a mesh one, grab it! You can store a lot of soap in it and they dry completely out. I also have little spiky soap savers at all of the sinks to put the soaps on so they'll dry completely between uses. I bought a case of them from the dollar store (online) and give them to friends when I give them soap. This is what they look like. They're very useful and good to have; plus, they're really cheap and washable, unlike wooden soap racks that are popular. (
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000DZFA66/?tag=skimlinks_replacement-20)
OK. I guess I've bored everyone long enough. These are my "tips" on getting a harder and longer lasting bar of soap. Vinegar will give an immediate result; but a lengthy cure will give the best result. The hardest bar in the world is going to dissolve into mush if it is left in water. You've got to make sure it is thoroughly dried between uses.
