I made a soap with soy wax for the very first time. Or well, my soy wax is not pure, but also have palm wax in it, 20% palm wax I think it was. The supplier sent me the wrong type of soy wax. I was so nervous, i sort of expected a full seize immediately, or something like that. But it did not do it. It thickened, yes, and suddenly rapidly. But I added some water and it loosened up again so that I could work with it. I think my stickblender is way too powerful as well, even on the lowest setting. I did short bursts, but forgot to handstir in between. I wanted emulsion, which it was before it started to thicken on me. I ended up with thick trace. But, it was manageable for the time I needed (I do work very fast and leave a mess like no other), and I could have used longer time, actually. That is a big improvement from what I'm used to. I have used a vegetable lard kind of mixed product that really does seize up in an instant. Soy wax was way better. I actually could swirl the top with a chopstick. And that is truly amazing, since I have never been able to do things like that before.
I think soy wax can work really well. If I buy the cheapest ever slow working plastic stickblender, it would make it easier not to overmix.
I used the soy wax at 22,12% of the recipe. And had a 40% lye solution. My colors were mixed with water, and I added extra water to the uncolored part after it thickened. Plus EDTA was dissolved in water. All in all it had more water than the 40% lye solution. I soaped relatively hot, my oils were around 45 celsius and my lue 57 celsius (I was a little impatient to get started, so the lye was a little hotter than I originally wanted).
When I melted the oils together, it did take some heat for the soy wax to melt. But I did measure the temperature where my oils began to solidify again. And that was 32 degrees celsius. So, next time I will try to soap cooler, at 35 degrees celsius, and use a weaker lye solution (more water), reduce the amount of castor oil (I had 7,7%), remove the teaspoon of kaolin clay, remove the 1/2 teaspoon of sugar, and see if I get a more fluid batter. I know I can get stearic spots when soaping colder, but I don't bother too much about that.
I wonder one thing. I had a small rest of rice bran oil, and I have never soaped with it before (I bought it for soap but used it for cooking instead). I used 9,62% rice bran oil and the rest was refined olive oil and castor for my soft oils. What I wonder is if anybody know if rice bran oil can contribute to thickening of the batter? I mean, compared to refined olive oil, which is said to be one of the slowest to trace. Is rice bran oil quicker tracing? I want to try rice bran oil in much higher percentage, just to see how I like the final soap. Here, it is twice the price of olive oil, and I have only seen it in one shop, that is not even a grocery store but more like a dollar store type. It is definately not a common oil at all. But, it has more palmitic acid than olive oil, and since I can't find anything else that stinking red palm oil in this country (which I won't use), I want as much palmitic acid as possible without using palm oil (yes, I have not forgot that my soy wax have some palm in it).
I have high hopes for soy wax as a replacement for hard oils (which in this country is non-existing). I want to try even higher percentage of soy wax in a recipe, but don't dare before I have learned to work with it in a better way. My soy wax thatjust contains palm wax will probably never work the same as 100% soy wax anyway. But I have to use up what I have before buying anything else.
Since my soy wax have 20% (if I remember correctly) of palm wax in it, I had to mail the company Cargill and ask if they had sap.values for it. I got an answer with roughly sap.values, which seems to be very close to the listing for soy wax in lye calculators, so I could just use that. BUT, the guy at Cargill told me something strange, an asked me to explain how I could use this for soaping. So, I will see if I find anything unusual or strange or any problems with my soap, and then reply to him + ask him if I can post in this forum what he said.
Now I will go online and buy a new stickblender. I will look for a "worst in test" model, a flimsy plastic one that hardly spins. I think it would make the world a little easier if I could keep my nuclear powerhouse of a stickblender out of the soap bowl. But I will definately keep it, it is very good for liquid soap or anything slow tracing. Very good for hot process as well. But too good for the delicate cold process.
By the way, if anybody are desperately looking for a black afghan scent, Vanilla Oud from Eroma in Australia is, as I can judge, pure black afghan, which is a type of arabic mukhallath (perfume oil). I was sooo pleasantly surprised when I opened the bottle and had a sniff, it was finally the mukhallath type of scent I have been looking all over the world for (but I had it, stupid me have just not opened all my bottles). The pleasant surprise soon became disappointment. The scent is really nice and all that, very arabic and exotic. But, it is very smoky. Black afghan is supposed to be smoky, and of course Vanilla Oud was too. I like the smell of smoky scents, but I can't tolerate them, I get headache. So I had to find something to dillute it with. I used it in my soap, but mixed it with a scent called Oud, Amber & Musk (if I remember right), a more to me fruity type of smell. I'm not sure if I like the two combined or not. I will judge after some curing. Unfortunately it was still smoky. We'll see how it turns out in the end. I didn't like my colors either (dull and too similar and too mixed together and too weak colors, and my mica lines seemed to disappear), but I hope for a pleasant surprise when cutting. After all, the color is not the most important at the moment. It was more important to make a soap that does not mess out the sink with colored lather, and it is way more important right now how to soap feels, how it lathers, which type of later etc. Colors and design can easily be changed for the better in the future. It is much harder to nail a recipe that works how I would like it to. So that is the number one priority at the moment. I hope it will turn out beyond perfect with lots of shaving foam like lather, but we'll see.
And again, it became a tooooo long post with almost no content other than chit-chat. Well, well, another area where I need to make improvements.
Happy soaping, folks!
