xantham gum and fluidity

[katre]

Hello everyone. Last week I made a nice liquid soap:
70% OO
10% CO
20% castor oil
It turned out to be a very nice soap and I thickened it with salt.
Then I wanted to add some sweet almond oil, some D-panthenol and glycerin to this beautiful soap to make it more moisturizing and use it as a shower gel.
But whenever I add glycerin or D-panthenol, the consistency of the soap deteriorates and becomes fluid like water. I can't fix it by adding salt.
I tried adding xantham gum and it didn't thicken. I tried combining xantham gum with glycerin and it still didn't work. I tried guar gum and it still didn't thicken.
I read that xhantam gum works very well in some friends' formulas like this. Why wasn't it in my formula?
Do you have any advice on how I can thicken my shower gel? But please I only want natural product. I don't want to use anything that contains harmful ingredients.

 

[AliOop]

The answer to your question is fairly complex, so I'm going to give a few basic suggestions:

1. For more glycerin in your recipe, start by dissolving your KOH in an equal amount of distilled water. Then use glycerin in place of the remaining batch water that you use to make your initial paste. This not only gets more glycerin into your soap paste, it also speeds up the time to trace.

2. After you've made the paste, use less dilution water for a thicker soap. This can be difficult since some soaps just won't dissolve without a lot of water.

3. Try thickening with stearic acid, like this recipe, here. The beginning of the thread has a step-by-step tutorial with pictures that spans multiple posts. I summarized it without pictures in post #205, using the easy glycerin method I referred to above. I don't use the heated glycerin method referred to in the original recipe. This is my SIL's favorite "shower gel" - although it isn't gel-like, it is thick and very gentle on the skin.

Thickening LS is a tricky business. What works in one recipe -- a specific amount of salt solution, hydroxycellulose, or xanthan gum -- often fails in another recipe. Consider purchasing this e-book on liquid soap. There you can learn more about the science of thickening LS, as well as possible ingredients to consider. I and several others here have purchased this book and found it incredibly useful to know what works, what doesn't, and why.