Want to melt body butter and turn into soap

[loopyloop]

So...made some nice body butter but stupidly put far too much essential oils in it. Can I melt it back and turn it to soap? Should work in my mind...

 

[dixiedragon]

Some people would argue that it is necessary to take the ingredients of the body butter, and break it down so you can plug those into your lye calculator. Me, I'd just do my regular soap recipe and replace 5% of my hard oil (palm, lard, etc) with that weight of the body butter.

What are the ingredients of the body butter? if you used something like mineral oil, I don't think you can soap it.

Another option might be to make some unscented BB and mix in your scented BB.

 

[loopyloop]

I've done all the soapcalc palaver of course. I have the recipe ready. Only wanted to know whether melting back would give same results in soap...

 

[dixiedragon]

I'm sure it's possible to heat an oil to the point that it breaks down or something and becomes useless for making soap. But I doubt that's something a home soaper could achieve easily!

 

[Arimara]

I don't see why you can't use it in a soap. If you melt down the body butter, just enough so that is completely liquid, and avoid soaping too cool, you should have it made to make soap with. Now if you wanted the properties of the oils and essential oils to survive, save some of that body butter for your superfat.

 

[The Efficacious Gentleman]

Just in case this has been overlooked - the properties of the oils in your body butter may not necessarily be the same as the properties of the salts in your soap.

If your body butter has a lot of coconut oil, for example, then it is likely to be great for your skin. But then your soap will have a lot of sodium cocoate and so WON'T be so good for the skin

 

[loopyloop]

Thank you all. I'll have a go...would be a shame to throw away.

 

[earlene]

I am looking forward to hearing how it goes, both during the process of turning it into soap and how the soap turns out.

 

[The Efficacious Gentleman]

Would be interested to know the recipe, to see how it compares to recipes people would use for soap. I know that my body butters are very different compared to my soaps

 

[Susie]

I doubt some of that essential oils survive the process, but the base oils are base oils, and you should be able to soap with them. With the exception of mineral oil, of course. And that is going to be a relatively costly soap. I would never use some of the oils in my BB in soap. They are just too expensive for that.

 

[dixiedragon]

I'm still not sure why you wouldn't just add more oils (shea, etc) vs turning it into soap?

 

[loopyloop]

Because I'd have to add a lot. I can't use a kilo of BB. Recipe is shea, cocoa, coconut, almond, equal parts. Haven't got around to doing it yet... hoping at the weekend.

 

[loopyloop]

Made this morning, turned out just fine. Will see when unmoulding

 

[Susie]

Because I'd have to add a lot. I can't use a kilo of BB. Recipe is shea, cocoa, coconut, almond, equal parts. Haven't got around to doing it yet... hoping at the weekend.

I have done this exact thing for a slightly different reason, and since I knew exactly how much of each oil was in the BB, the soap turned out fine. I am glad you went ahead with this.

I am thinking about making a sort of body butter out of my soaping oils, in order to masterbatch them, I will start experimenting on this tomorrow just to see if it makes extra work.