Formulating your own soap recipe can be tricky. There are some nice tools estimating the final soap characteristics like hardness, conditioning, bubliness, creaminess of lather like for example soapcalc.

But getting the real feel of it is an experience.

And while this estimate gives you an idea on the final soap characteristics, it won’t tell you how each oil reacts in the saponification process, what would be the color of the soap or how fast it will go rancid (although this can be estimated from the oil shelf life itself)

Therefore I decided to make a test of ten 100% one-oil soaps, to get a feeling about:

how the oils react in the saponification – e.g. do they trace fast or you have to whip long time?

– e.g. do they fast or you have to whip long time? the cure time

the final soap color

hardness, bubliness, creaminess of lather

I will share with you my experience in two posts. The results are more interesting than I expected – some soaps did not behave according to estimates at all…

The one oil soap experiment set up

