Cold Process Soap and Types of Oils

August 8th, 2007 by Ambriel Maji

During the process of making soap you can either make a basic recipe of you can dabble a little into the more luxury butters to add to your recipes. Understanding the different types of butters and the effects they will have on your soap recipes can greatly help you understand what you need to do when re-batching a bad batch of cold process soap also.

For a harder, longer lasting more stable bar of soap you would want to use oils like palm oil, beef tallow and/or lard. You can mix and match the amounts of oils you use or use only one type in you recipes.

For a bar that is full of soft creamy lather the best way to go is coconut oil. Your next runners up would be castor oil and palm kernel oil. Coconut being one of the cheapest of the three oils is what the majority of soap maker’s use while making cold process soap.

Now if you’re looking for a great moisturizing or conditioning soap you have even more choices between olive oil, canola oil, sunflower oil and soybean oil. These oils will create a great moisturizing bar of soap and are also assets to making shampoo bars of soap. Just make sure if you are making shampoo bars you do not use a lot of these oils or the persons hair will come out a tad greasy.

Now lets look at those oils that all we women love to have incorporated into our bars of soap. These oils are all top luxury type oils that will create some of the most intense moisturizing benefits in a bar of soap. The oils you will want to use for this effect will be Cocoa butter, Shea butter, almond oil, hemp oil and jojoba oil. I love a mixture of jojoba oil and Shea butter I have found that these two butter together generate one of the most luxurious bars of soap anyone could ask for.

source: http://www.waxandbubbles.com/cold-process-soap-and-types-of-oils/