Make homemade soap and you enjoy watching the fascinating transformation of fats and oils to luxury soap. It s an amazing process. The basic ingredients of all soap include water, fats and lye. Combining these three materials in the correct proportions results in a product that doesn t resemble any of the ingredients. Here are some tips about choosing the fats.
You can make soap using almost any kind of fat. That includes most oils too. Anything from peanut oil to mink oil will work. The challenging part to designing soap recipes is that soap made from different fats has different characteristics. Plus not all oils cost the same either.
Central to most soap recipes is one single type of oil. It s coconut oil. Palm kernel oil is almost identical too. Why coconut oil? It s mostly the lather. See, nothing else really makes soap that lathers like coconut oil. Not that other soap oils don t make lather. It s just that no other soap oil produces bubbles and lather like coconut. At least not as such an affordable price.
Coconut oil is not the perfect soap oil though. Here s why... Coconut oil soap cleans so well that it strips the oil from skin and that results in a drying feel. It s a great cleaner but a poor moisturizer as a soap oil. That s where other oils work better.
For example, the star moisturizer as soap oil is olive oil. It has the property of actually attracting moisture to the skin so it s a great moisturizer. Now olive oil makes great soap as the sole base oil. That s what classic castile soap is... all olive oil soap. But pure olive oil soap only makes a thin lather with little small bubbles. It s a luxury soap, but it calls out for some help by coconut oil.
Then there are the other heavily used oils that often make up a large portion of soaps.
Chief ingredient in many commercial soaps is tallow or beef fat. That may sound a little yucky, but remember the fats mostly turn to soap. So even if a soap is made with tallow, there s very little if any actual tallow left in the finished soap. It s now soap. So what about tallow as a soap ingredient?
It makes really white soap. It makes really hard, long lasting soap. It bubbles some but not much. It cleans good too, but not like coconut. It s somewhat moisturizing, but not like olive oil. It s cheap too. In short, it combines well with coconut and olive oils to make ideal soap.
Often palm oil, not palm kernel oil, is used as the vegetable equivalent of tallow. It does much of what tallow does, but at higher cost, though without the negative stigma of animal fats.
The combination of olive, coconut and palm oils makes almost ideal soap. These three fats are basic to making homemade soap of the highest quality.
But what about shea butter? What about hemp seed oil? What about cherry pit oil or apricot kernel oil or emu oil or whatever?
All kinds of exotic oils can contribute to ideal handmade soap. But, use the basic three oils alone and you can build superior soap at reasonable cost. Only resort to high priced, exotic oils to tweak an already exceptional soap. High priced oils will not correct a faulty design in homemade soap.
Make homemade soap using just a few basic ingredients and you can make truly superior soap. Exotic ingredients are no substitute for a well thought out combination of simple ingredients as the base soap oils.
Author Resource:
Al Bullington and his family made and sold soap for years and learned to make money with soap. Read more about their experiences at their website: ======>>> http://SoapBizKit.com .
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