Cleansing - This refers to the soap's ability to grab on to oils. A soap molecule is a chain of carbon atoms. One end of the chain attracts water, the other end attracts oil. When you wash your skin with soap and water, multiple chains will gather around a droplet of oil with their oil-hungry ends attached to the oil droplet. The water hungry ends are surrounded with water. To make this happen you need to mix up (scrub or rub) the soap and water on your skin. When you rinse, the oil droplets with the attached soap molecules are washed away. Some soap molecules can have a very hungry oil grabbing end. Soap made with too much Lauric and/or Myristic Acid can irritate the skin by washing away the protective layer of surface oils on the skin. Generally speaking, keeping the total of coconut and palm kernal in your recipe to no more than 30-35% can avoid this. A typical range for Cleansing would be 14 to 22. A soap recipe within this range, and made properly, will not irritate the skin.
i'm not really sure how to explain what you are asking, other then the fact that, that particular
lye calculator ( in my opinion) doesn't take in to account the end product. we know that a soap made with 100% olive oil if given a good cure has lather and is as hard as a brick, yet it shows it to be a soft soap, it also doesn't give it good conditioning numbers and it is as mild as a soap can get. if you run a 100% olive oils soap thru the soapmaker calculator it will show that you get a bar with 5.4 hardness 3.2 fluffy (which is your bubbly) and 8.5 stable ( creamy) and 9.5 conditioning.
i don't take the numbers it gives me for any soap i make in stone, it is a good tool and i use it as a reference to give me some idea on how it should end up but it is the finished product that is the true example. that and my customers are what tell me if my soap is good. it all has to do with how the combo of oils work with one another. the soaps properties that i like ( for me i like a soap that has more lineolic acids, i have dry skin, while my hubby and dd prefer one higher in oleic acids) are certainly not the properties others may like in their finished product.
and that probably didn't answer your question at all. :?
