A step towards understanding the process. I Really enjoyed reading your blog and as an Occupational Therapist, I applaud you for be an excellent teacher and role model for your niece. Thank you Clara. The answer is no. It's easy to do. Making your own soap allows you to add your preferred ingredients such as different fragrance oils and herbs for a one-of-a-kind concoction. However, unfortunately, the makers of Red Devil have discontinued making it.You cannot buy drain cleaner these days and use it in your soap making because the caustic soda has been mixed with other ingredients that will cause your soap to fail.You could try your local hardware store for caustic soda, or, if all else fails you can try various online outlets to buy caustic soda via mail.Here is a list of online companies for caustic soda that you might want to try: Camden-Grey Bramble Berry The Lye Guy Boyer Corporation Essential Depot AAA Chemical Texas Natural Supply Bitter Creek Candle Co. Lehman's Soapmaking Supplies Snowdrift Farm The Soap Dish Biodiesel BarnRegardsKathrynCountryfarm Lifestyles, eval(ez_write_tag([[300,250],'countryfarm_lifestyles_com-box-4','ezslot_6',261,'0','0'])); More water does not make the process safer either for soapmaker or soap so it’s not worth adding extra water for that reason. It took her all of 7 minutes to message me back with the correct number for olive oil. I am a teacher in USA and am trying to understand the process myself. I’m using grams, but you could just as well do the calculations in ounces – or any other weight unit. If it’s this simple to caculate lye with a saponification chart and a calculator (or an abacus, or just your head), can’t we just abandon lye calculators altogether? Caustic soda or lye is commonly referred to as sodium hydroxide at the store. And unless you have remarkable computing skills, making adjustments, tweaks, and changes to formulations will be a lot quicker on a lye calculator than by means of pen and paper. Now I suggested that she calculate how much lye she would need for a small batch of e.g. But if we’re making skincare soap we should make sure to have a little bit of superfat too. Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email. This is a confusing part for me, so if you can help that would be appreciated. ****************************************************Kim,In the good old days you could get caustic soda at your local supermarket. Lye can cause severe burns and damage your eyes. (Allendale, MI), Where do I get Caustic Soda? So, let’s say our first recipe looks like this: We have a nice new mould and we know that it fits a batch of 730 grams of oils. Generally 3% is a standard rate, but fragrance oils can vary a lot in strength so unless the supplier gives an indication you’ll need to test your way ahead starting from 3%. To keep our numbers in order let’s keep them in a table. In the first case the total will be 100% and in the second the total will be 130% as it were. Instead I told her what I’ve told many others: good soapmaking is not about having a good recipe, good soapmaking is about understanding what makes the recipe good. © 2020 Auntie Clara's Handcrafted Cosmetics. How? Any water amount in excess of a 1:1 water:lye ratio is in fact a surplus. I did want to mention that in your second example, the incorrect saponification value was written down for beef tallow. // Leaf Group Lifestyle, Kitchen Doctor: Soap 101: Making Your Own Shampoo and Soap, Super Soak Making: Making Your Own Soap Recipe. I’m doing it on the calculator on my phone: 30% = 30/100 = 0.3 so if you don’t have a handy %-button on your calculator you can do it like this and it will give you the same answer: There we go. Originally from Helsingfors in Finland and now a happy resident of Somerset West, South Africa, she is soapmaker-in-chief and creative dynamo at Auntie Clara's Handcrafted Cosmetics. 2% pure pine tar will give lots of smell and colour to your soap. (Please note my error here: the saponification coefficient for tallow is 0.143 as per my saponification chart – not 0.140 as written down in this example. Remove the soap from the mold. Pour the soap mixture into the mold. Your email address will not be published. Combine the lye with the oil mixture slowly once they both cooled off. I’m glad if it was of help. I can use an electric mixer, but first I had to learn how to make a cake from scratch with just a bowl and a spoon. Now that we know how this works, let’s try another recipe. A slight surplus of oil gives us a safety margin in our lye calculation. E.g. of water into a plastic container. The chemicals fermented are the caustic soda and the soda ash. Angela LaFollette holds a Bachelor of Arts in advertising with a minor in political science from Marshall University. In the soap you made what is the water to lye ratio you used? In reality saponification values for oils vary depending on factors such as growing conditions, varietals, extraction method etc. Wear gloves and goggles when handling lye. The use of caustic soda, commonly referred to as lye, makes soaps that need to cure for nearly a month before you can use the soap. A couple of days later she made her first soap from a recipe she had formulated herself (I checked that the formulation and the calculations were sound and correct) and by all accounts the soap turned out beautiful and is now curing nicely. I will be sending folks here for this. Thank you for the great explanation on how to calculate lye solution I am worried about lye but now it is easy for me. Your email address will not be published. Clara Lindberg is passionate about making soap. For each oil you will have one coefficient for KOH (potassium hydroxide aka caustic potash) and another one for NaOH (sodium hydroxide aka caustic soda). The water activates the lye and makes the saponification reaction possible. We could create a neat excel sheet, but since we don’t need a computer for this I’m doing it in good old paper-and-pencil style: To get the weight of each individual oil we’ll multiply each percentage by 730. To do that she needed to google ’saponification chart’ and start by finding the sodium hydroxide saponification coefficient for olive oil. the NaOH saponification coefficient for olive oil is 0.135. These values are often given as a range of numbers, typically somewhere between 100 and 300. Making your own soap allows you to add your preferred ingredients such as different fragrance oils and herbs for a one-of-a-kind concoction. It’s super easy to understand! Is there a rule of thumb, because I’ve looked online and seen everything from 0.75% to 8% of the total oils. If you run these ‘recipes’ through SoapCalc.net you’ll get slightly different numbers because Soap Calc uses more decimals and doesn’t round oil weights, but the differences are very small. However, unfortunately, the makers of Red Devil have discontinued making it. handmade soap image by Alison Bowden from, Copyright 2020 Leaf Group Ltd. All Rights Reserved. Pine tar is a bit tricky since very little of it is saponified. In addition soap properties like hardness, lather and cleansing numbers are broad but valuable guidelines for formulation. Instead, they were chosen to illustrate how lye calculations and lye discount calculations work. Reputable fragrance oil suppliers will give usage rate recommendations for their products. I enjoy your posts. A good reminder how important it is to always check and double check recipes and calculations. Fantastic tutorial! Add 25 oz. This should be a must read for all just starting out. we will use 100% – 5% = 95% of our lye.

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