Making Your Own Soap Recipe
As you journey through the world of soapmaking, you'll encounter lots of delightful recipes, from the most dermatologically pleasing soaps to the utterly flashy ones. Most of these recipes are available on the Internet, while quite a number of them can be obtained from soapmaking books or magazines. At some point in your soapmaking career, the little daredevil inside you will wake up, and you'll eventually want to experiment and try concocting your own recipe. In fact, if you've become a soapmaking aficionado, I'm pretty sure you're already thinking of a catchy name for your soap. (Don't even deny it! I know you're guilty). If you've never made soap before, I strongly suggest you check out basic information on how to make soap first before you try making up your own recipe. It's always safer to try tested recipes when starting out.
What do you want to get out of your soap?
That's the first question you will need to ask yourself before you go listing down ingredients for your recipe. Do you want to get a nice rich lather from it when you use it? Do you want it to smell in a certain way? Do you want it to be a "healthy" soap full of vitamins and minterals? Do you want it to serve a special purpose (i.e. anti-acne, anti-eczema)? Asking these questions serves as a prelude to the actual steps of creating your own recipe.
Selecting Which Oils To Use
The first step in creating your own recipe is picking out the oil or oils you are going to use. Each particular type of oil contains a different combo of fatty acids that will give different properties to your soap. The oil you pick depends on what you want out of your soap. Try researching on the various types of oil you can use in soapmaking and their properties (or you could check out our page on oils here). But it doesn't stop there. You have to note the following factors too:
Saponification Index. This is the measure of how much lye is needed to transform that oil into soap (the process called saponification). Each oil has a different saponification index value. This is why you cannot just switch out oils while you're already following a written recipe.
Iodine Index Number. This helps you determine if you're bar is going to be a hard bar or a soft one. If a certain type of oil has a low iodine index number, it means it will produce a harder bar. Higher numbers mean that oil will create a softer one.
Superfatted oils. These are added to the soap mixture and will remain unsaponified during and after the process. These oils help create a more moisturizing bar of soap.
Calculating the Amount of Lye Required
Designing your own recipe requires calculation as well as knowledge on how to use a lye calculator. Why calculate? Well, each type of fat requires a different amount of lye to change it to soap. There are a lot of lye calculators available on the Internet these days. You can familiarize yourself with how to use one or two of those to get you started.
Having incorrect ratios will affect the quality of soap, resulting in bars that are unfit for use. It will also affect how your soap reaches trace. Most soapmaking problems are a result of having the wrong lye-to-fat ratios.
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