Ok, let's see how many members can make a quality soap today.

JBLA said:

It depends on how you're cooking it, and how long you're cooking it for. This is actually one of the less exciting parts of hot process soapmaking, as during the process, you're essentially sitting there for a couple of hours letting it cook and stirring it every so often, and keeping an eye on it.

Like pretty much anything else, if you let it go too long unattended, or use too high a heat, you can scorch it, which causes bad things to happen. It shouldn't be an issue if you're paying attention and exercising common sense, but I wouldn't set the soap to cook then go see a screening of Laurence of Arabia and hope for the best.

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Great movie, one of my all time faves. ......is there any automated tool with a timer that can aide?

>Great movie, one of my all time faves. ......is there any automated tool with a timer that can aide?

I'm sure there's probably a phone app or download that will work. I tend to just do other stuff at the computer and keep an eye on the clock in the corner of the screen. It's really just a matter of stirring it every so often and not forgetting about it, it's not like a chocolate souffle that has to be timed just right or everything collapses.

I would suggest checking out soapcalc.net. It has a lye calculator that if used correctly will allow you to figure out exactly how much lye you need. You can also play around with the base oils on there to develop a soap you like, though keep in mind those are general characteristics, and the end result you produce will depend on your mix and how you treat it. Case in point, I started with one recipe that I thought looked pretty good, about melted my face off, then continued to tweak.

Also, if you don't have a scale that measures in grams, it will be much more difficult as all of the research I have done calculates everything in weights rather than by volume. I would suggest this or risk aforementioned facial pain.

JBLA said:

>Great movie, one of my all time faves. ......is there any automated tool with a timer that can aide?

I'm sure there's probably a phone app or download that will work. I tend to just do other stuff at the computer and keep an eye on the clock in the corner of the screen. It's really just a matter of stirring it every so often and not forgetting about it, it's not like a chocolate souffle that has to be timed just right or everything collapses.

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Oh....isn't the timing. am essential element for the best quality outcome?

cmush said:

I would suggest checking out soapcalc.net. It has a lye calculator that if used correctly will allow you to figure out exactly how much lye you need. You can also play around with the base oils on there to develop a soap you like, though keep in mind those are general characteristics, and the end result you produce will depend on your mix and how you treat it. Case in point, I started with one recipe that I thought looked pretty good, about melted my face off, then continued to tweak.

Also, if you don't have a scale that measures in grams, it will be much more difficult as all of the research I have done calculates everything in weights rather than by volume. I would suggest this or risk aforementioned facial pain.

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Can the melting face issue lead to permanent skin marks?

A sufficiently strong caustic can definitely scar, blind, or even kill you. You'd have to mess up a recipe very, VERY badly to ever encounter that (it's definitely possible though, some people are bad with decimals). In the case where Cmush is talking about where he simply underestimated the purity level of his caustic, it's not likely. MdC for instance tests their soaps for excess lye by pressing it to their tongue, at the pH levels you're LIKELY to encounter if your mistake is minor, there is less risk; but still, a zap test on the tongue or even a few hand washings may be advisable before you go rubbing any soap on your face; just seems reasonable to minimize the risk.

As always, safety first. If your thought process is "I wonder if I can safely do or skip this, contrary to recommended safety procedures", the answer should be "no".

alex2363 said:

Oh....isn't the timing. am essential element for the best quality outcome?

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Well, you have to cook it long enough that all the lye is reacted, but not so long that it burns or scorches, but it's not a matter of having to be on time to the nearest second (or minute, or 5-10 minutes). If you're using a regular crockpot, you may find it's fully cooked in 60-90 minutes, but you may want to leave it in another hour or two to cook off some of the water and give it a firmer texture. You just don't want to undercook it or overcook it, but there's a lot of room in the middle.

Also keep in mind that you have to let it cool for roughly as long as you cooked it, so it gets cool enough to add scents without them evaporating, or to pour into plastic jars/molds without melting them.

It can be a lot of waiting.

JBLA said:

Well, you have to cook it long enough that all the lye is reacted, but not so long that it burns or scorches, but it's not a matter of having to be on time to the nearest second (or minute, or 5-10 minutes). If you're using a regular crockpot, you may find it's fully cooked in 60-90 minutes, but you may want to leave it in another hour or two to cook off some of the water and give it a firmer texture. You just don't want to undercook it or overcook it, but there's a lot of room in the middle.

Also keep in mind that you have to let it cool for roughly as long as you cooked it, so it gets cool enough to add scents without them evaporating, or to pour into plastic jars/molds without melting them.

It can be a lot of waiting.

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Are there specific special scents made for incorporating into soaps?

So this is a great thread. I have been thinking of doing this for awhile now. Both body and shaving soaps. Eagerly waiting on questions, answers, and recipes. Thanks!

Yesterday I tried my hand at soap-making for the first time, and while it's too early to declare it a success, it certainly doesn't look like a failure yet (except with regards to scent, more on that below).

I made the soap using the Cold Process / Oven Process -- i.e. pour the cold process mix into the mold, "bake" in the oven at the lowest possible temperature (150 F in my case) for one hour, and leave in warm oven over night. This morning the soap looked completely set, and passed the "tongue zap" test. I used it to wash my hands, but was too harsh (too drying), and my hands had a suspicious light burning feeling until I rinsed them in vinegar. I'll let it cure for a couple more weeks at least before testing the ph again (next time I'll use Phenolphthalein rather than the tongue test, which has proven inaccurate).

I wanted to make a tobacco scented soap, since I have quite a bit of "essence of tobacco" that I had previously extracted from whole tobacco leaves (using a hot/cold maceration method -- google "N.E.T. maceration" if you are curious), but wanted a more woodsy backnote to the soap. To that end I mixed by tobacco extract with an essential oil I had ordered alongside the soap-making supplies, but even at what I thought was a generous ratio of tobacco to other oil, the tobacco is undetectable at the moment. In addition, the essential oil I used did not yield the scent I was after, so I'll have to try something else next time.

I'm not ready to share my recipe for a couple of reasons: 1) I have no idea if this will work as a shaving soap, and don't want to steer others in the wrong direction, and 2) if I do hit a home-run with this, I might want to sell the occasional soap puck (I'm a doctoral student in the humanities, so need all the extra cash I can get...)

But I will say that searching this forum has yielded quite a few tips on soap-making. To wit:

• high percentages of Stearic Acid help the lathering process, and Stearic Acid works best with KOH rather than NaOH, though NaOH seems to be the preferred lye for solid soaps.
• 19th century books on soap making are gold mines for shaving soap recipes. I found a few digitized ones after a quick search in my university's library site. Google books and the Internet Archive might be good places to look for those without access to a university library.
• Tallow seems to be the preferred oil in shaving soap recipes (though I did not use it in my soaps)
• Lye calculators are invaluable. Here's a few:
• http://summerbeemeadow.com/content/advanced-calculator-solid-cream-or-liquid-soaps
• http://www.soapguild.org/Certified-Lye/lye-calculator.php
• http://soapcalc.net/calc/SoapCalcWP.asp

I'll post again in a few weeks after I try shaving with my soap (or make a better batch).

As SliceOfLife mentioned, the melting of the face may be a wee bit of an exaggeration, using caustics always carries a risk, and as mentioned elsewhere, safety should be the top concern. (In retrospect, I should tell you about a fish up Stribby Crick from where I grew up named Ol' Fighter, as the family legend goes.)

In any case, my family has been blessed with not only gnarly thick pencil lead like whiskers, but sensitive skin to boot. Also, in the effort of being economical, I attempted an extremely small batch, which made the margin for error on the lye that much smaller. Allowing it to rest for a week made it much more mild, but it still wasn't right so I went back to the drawing board. Last couple of batches have been heads and tails better.

Now just to dial in the scent levels...

SliceOfLife said:

A sufficiently strong caustic can definitely scar, blind, or even kill you. You'd have to mess up a recipe very, VERY badly to ever encounter that (it's definitely possible though, some people are bad with decimals). In the case where Cmush is talking about where he simply underestimated the purity level of his caustic, it's not likely. MdC for instance tests their soaps for excess lye by pressing it to their tongue, at the pH levels you're LIKELY to encounter if your mistake is minor, there is less risk; but still, a zap test on the tongue or even a few hand washings may be advisable before you go rubbing any soap on your face; just seems reasonable to minimize the risk.

As always, safety first. If your thought process is "I wonder if I can safely do or skip this, contrary to recommended safety procedures", the answer should be "no".

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This sounds very risky, even downright unhealthy.

It's been done for hundreds (thousands?) of years. It's how housewives used to make soap with potash. They'd keep adding more fat until it stopped tingling on their tongue. It'd certainly be very risky if you were seriously off the mark on the ratio of lye to fat or if you tried it before saponification had largely completely; but for someone experienced with soap-making, it's a fairly mundane test. I personally preferred chemical pH tests or good old buffer zones in my fat ratio.

alex2363 said:

Are there specific special scents made for incorporating into soaps?

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Pretty much anything that smells good to you and doesn't irritate your skin can be added (do your homework on the phototoxic nature of some citrus oils if you're going to be using substantial quantities, and check on other products to see if they are known to cause irritation). I'm a big fan of using essential oils, as I like stuff that comes directly from flowers and plants, but those can get very costly very quickly. Synthetic fragrance oils are, generally speaking, much cheaper, and give you a much broader range of options.

Whatever you use, it's best to wait for the soap to cool down a bit, as otherwise the scent oils will "flash" and your workspace will smell wonderful, but all of the scent won't make it into the soap. Don't wait too long though, as a fully solidified soap is hard to stir scents into.

Do bear in mind that the pH of soaps will vary from soap to soap. All will be alkaline, none will be neutral (that is not a 'soap' made with lye and oils).

So, if you test the pH, how do you know that it is safe to use? If the pH varies from soap to soap, you need to know if 9 or 10 is safe for that particular recipe. Because the pH is terrible for finding out what you really need to know - is there unreacted lye in my soap?

To detect this, the best way is to do the zap test. It is not dangerous, as you just dab on to the tongue, not shove a chunk in and close your mouth! I have done more damage eating pizza when it is too hot than I have ever done with zap testing, and I have had some zaps from soaps!

Also bear in mind that "Slice of Life" knows his stuff, as does JBLA. It's worth listening to them, even if you think what they are saying can't be right.

Edited to add - not many pros will be giving away their recipes!

I'm interested in following this adventure, but I won't actually be making any soap. Like all creative projects it will require making a lot of bad soap and learning along the way. I'm too old to be looking for another hobby to do badly.

So, it turns out that the suspicious burning I had felt was not from the soap. Not sure where it came from, perhaps a minute amount of lye fell into my gloves? If so, any advice on how to clean that? I'm thinking that soaking it in diluted white vinegar will do the trick, but am curious if there are better ways to do this.

At any rate, I just shaved with my soap this morning (about 36 hours after I made it). The zap test seems to have gotten it right: saponification was done, as far as I can tell. I figured the soap would have too much water, since it had very little time to cure, but I reasoned that for a shaving soap, and especially for a newbie wet shaver like me, this may be an advantage. After all, it makes loading the brush a lot easier!

I'm going to declare this first attempt a qualified success! It lathered very easily, and the lather lasted 2 passes, until I ran out and had to make some more for the 3rd pass. I have this problem with the Kell's Original soap as well, so there's a very good chance it's an operator error. I need to load more soap and work it in the bowl a bit longer, I think.

The recipe I used consisted of Stearic Acid, Coconut oil, Castor oil, and Olive oil, using both KOH and NaOH as lyes, and adding some Glycerin and Oak Moss fragrance oil. The lyecalc widget predicted a soap low in conditioning, but my face doesn't feel dry after shaving (though perhaps the Arko aftershave is compensating for that). Next batch I'll change the proportions of the oils a bit, and up the added Glycerin, and see if I can make it more conditioning and equally (if not more) lather-friendly.

The Oak Moss fragrance oil smells like a mass produced soap would. Think Irish Spring, or something like that. Next time I plan on making one with Eucalyptus and another with only my homemade tobacco extracts for fragrance.

For what its worth, I made a 100 gram (oil weight) batch, and that just about filled a small Pyrex bowl I bought at a local Goodwill store. It's not quite this bowl, but very similar.

If there's any interest, I can post a photo of this first soap attempt.

You can just soak the gloves in a lot of water - water can dilute the lye to a safe level whereas using an acid will generate a lot of heat which is not great. For lye spills, especially on skin, go to water first, lots of it. Dilute it down.

The soapcalc numbers are not the ultimate bible of how a soap will come out, even more so for speciality cases such as a shaving soap, where the properties we are after are vastly different than that of a bar of soap for showering with.

As for the cure, it will get better, but it is also amazingly soon after you are finished.

Effy said:

You can just soak the gloves in a lot of water - water can dilute the lye to a safe level whereas using an acid will generate a lot of heat which is not great. For lye spills, especially on skin, go to water first, lots of it. Dilute it down.

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Thanks, will do!

I'll keep shaving with this soap for a while before I make my next batch, and will see if my numbers need to be messed with at all. Once thing I will add (and only didn't this time because it's still in the mail) is a bit of Bentonite clay. From what I read it seems to be great for adding slip to shaving soaps. We'll see!

SliceOfLife said:

It's been done for hundreds (thousands?) of years. It's how housewives used to make soap with potash. They'd keep adding more fat until it stopped tingling on their tongue. It'd certainly be very risky if you were seriously off the mark on the ratio of lye to fat or if you tried it before saponification had largely completely; but for someone experienced with soap-making, it's a fairly mundane test. I personally preferred chemical pH tests or good old buffer zones in my fat ratio.

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very unusual methods i suppose.