We decided to do a little experiment today! When it comes to soap making oils, there is a world of difference between the most expensive and the cheapest soap making oils.
We decided to attempt to make a loaf of soap using the most expensive, luxury oils and to also make a loaf of soap using the cheapest oils. We wanted to see if using luxury oils and butters created a bar of soap that was noticeably different on the skin, or if the cheapest of bars would also hold its own and stand up to our high requirements.
We discuss our recipe, our oil choices and go through gram per gram costings, and we tell you the overall cost per bar of our cheap & steep bars - there was a HUGE difference in the cost price!
Watch as we first make a predominantly lard based soap and scent it with the cheapest Lavender essential oil we could find. We then move on to creating our steep bar. This includes oils and butters that we would never normally include in a soap - Monoi, Rosehip, Murumuru and Illipe to name a few! We also chose to use the most expensive Lavender essential oil that we could find - High Altitude French Lavender which cost a fortune and I fully expected to be a waste of money given that the therapeutic properties would likely not survive saponification.
We tried to keep the ratio of hard and soft oils similar in both recipes and also tried to keep a similar percentage of conditioning, cleansing oils etc as we wanted our experiment to be a fair one!
During the making process our steep bar of soap decided to misbehave, it traced far too quickly (possibly due to either the Monoi or Rosehip oils) and ended up looking fairly ugly! However, we are judging on performance, not looks!
We will be doing a part two video on these soaps, showing them after cure and doing a blind test on them to see which one we prefer. Once we have filmed and uploaded part two, it will be linked to this video so you can view our results!
Should you wish to recreate either recipe, they are both posted below:
For our Cheap recipe:
Sodium Hydroxide 99g
Water 148g
Lard 325g
Coconut oil 145g
Rapeseed Oil 217g
Castor Oil 36g
Lavender Essential Oil (from the Soapery) 21g
For our Steep recipe:
Sodium Hydroxide 103g
Water 155g
Monoi De Tahiti Infused Oil 145g
Murumuru Butter 72g
Kokum Butter 145g
Illipe Butter 72g
Apricot Kernel Oil 108g
Avocado Oil 72g
Rosehip Oil 72g
Castor Oil 36g
High Altitude French Lavender Essential Oil (from the Mystic Moments) 21g
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1 мар 2023
