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All Containers›Shop by use case›Soapmaking›The bar itself›Oils, and what each one contributesShop all soap and wash →
The bar itself

Oils, and what each one contributes

By Dwight Davis, Founder

Updated

On this page5

Every property of a finished bar comes from the fatty acid profile of the oils that made it.

Fatty acids, not oils

Soap makers talk about oils and the bar is made of fatty acids.

Lauric and myristic give hard bars and big bubbly lather, and are cleansing to the point of being stripping at high levels.

Palmitic and stearic give hardness and a stable creamy lather.

Oleic gives mildness and conditioning, and a slow-tracing, soft, long-curing bar.

Linoleic and linolenic are conditioning and are the ones that go rancid.

Which is why two very different oils with similar profiles behave similarly, and why a substitution should be made on profile rather than on name.

The four working oils

Olive, high oleic. Mild, slow to trace, soft at first and excellent after a long cure. A hundred-percent olive bar is the classic and needs months.

Coconut, high lauric. Hard, hugely bubbly, cleansing, and drying above roughly a third of the recipe.

Palm, balanced palmitic and oleic. Hardness and a stable lather, and it carries a sustainability question that is worth a real answer rather than a substitution made quietly.

Castor, ricinoleic. A few percent boosts and stabilizes lather markedly; much more makes a sticky bar.

Most recipes in the craft are some arrangement of those four.

The luxury oils

Shea, cocoa butter, avocado, sweet almond, rice bran, hemp.

They contribute at the margin and they are what the label is really selling, which is a legitimate reason to include them.

Be honest about the proportion: five percent of an oil is a real ingredient and is not what makes the bar work, and saying "made with shea butter" is true while implying more.

Building a formula

Start with a hardness contribution, a lather contribution and a conditioning contribution, then adjust.

Change one oil at a time, recalculate the lye every time, and make a small test batch.

And keep the formula recorded by oil, supplier and percentage, because substituting a supplier can change the fatty acid profile of a nominally identical oil.

References

No published source. This page is written from practice rather than from published guidance. No extension service or agency publishes on this question for soap, so nothing here is cited, and it should be weighed as experience and not as a standard.
Written from the federal regulation and FDA and CPSC guidance named on each page, not from a laboratory or a legal practice. Whether a particular product and a particular label make exempt soap, a cosmetic or a drug is a determination about your product, and this is not that determination.