SuperFatting Your Homemade Soap Recipes

If you are someone who knows how to make homemade soap, or you are simply looking to get started with homemade soap recipes, there is a good chance that you have heard the phrase superfatting being tossed around a lot. Superfatting is essentially the process of adding more oil to your soap while keeping the amount of lye that has been used essentially the same. If you are looking at your recipe, you can superfat it by looking at the lye and oil ratios and increasing your oil content by five percent or so.

When you are looking at how to make homemade soap and you want to know how to superfat a recipe, whether it is one that you have loved for years or whether it is something that you have always wanted to try, start with a lye calculator, which will often give you an option to superfat the recipe.You may also just figure it out mathematically. If you want to superfat the recipe by, say, five percent, take the amount of lye in the recipe and multiply it by .95, leaving the oil as it is.

Superfatting homemade soap recipes can leave you with a 3% increase in oil or even a 10% increase. Remember not to go overboard though. The free oil that remains in your recipe can go bad, and spoiled soap has small unattractive orange bubbles of spoiled free oil. This is a trial and error method, so keep good notes on what you are doing and what the results are.

You may be wondering why you would do this. The truth of the matter is that having too much lye is something that can be extremely bad for your soap. You’ll wind up with a product that you don’t like, that is far too abrasive and that may have you wishing that you had never gotten started in the first place! This is essentially saying that with superfatting your homemade soap recipes, it is better to err on the side of caution.

Similarly it is also important to realize that there is nothing wrong with soap that can add a little it of moisturizer to your hands. This gives your soap slightly more emollient qualities, which essentially means that it can soften your skin much more effectively.  As a lot of soap tends to dry your skin out, this can be very important.

Have some fun experimenting with the process of superfatting when you go to make homemade soap. You never know when it is going to make your next batch something really special!

Source: http://soapmakingsecret.com/superfatting-your-homemade-soap-recipes/