I’m posting my own personal and favorite soap recipe after Denny Lyon (Romancing The Chocolate) commented on my last blog post asking if I had any of my own recipes for making soap.
The oils in this soap are great emollients for the skin. I like olive oil soap, however olive oil alone doesn’t lather well so it is always best to use a small amount of other oils in with it. I adore the scent of mandarin; I much prefer it over the smell of oranges and find it a wonderfully refreshing, ‘clean’ and enlivening scent. The apricot seed meal is wonderful for exfoliating skin and is suitable for use on both the body and face.
So.. onto the recipe:
Ingredients (this will make around 2 pounds of soap)
- 22.4oz olive oil
- 3.2oz palm oil
- 3.2oz coconut oil
- 3.2oz apricot kernel oil
- 4.5oz lye
- 10.5oz water
- 1.6oz mandarin essential oil
- 2T apricot seed meal
All items are measured by weight ounces not liquid ounces, this includes any liquids, so you will need to remember to zero out your scales to take into account the weight of the containers you are measuring your ingredients into.
Follow the method for making basic soap, add the mandarin essential oil once it has reached the stage of being totally mixed but before it starts to get too thick (step 8), then add the apricot seed meal once the essential oil has been thoroughly mixed in.
Adding things like seed meal or similar can be a little tricky as you want the soap mixture thick enough to suspend the meal in the mix so as to not all sink to the bottom, however you don’t want it too thick either.
Some useful resources for soap making:
- A chart of saponifiction values of different oils for soap making, so as to calculate the amount of lye and the amount of water you need to use.
- One of the best online references I have found, especially for beginners is David Fisher’s Candle and Soap Making Site. He goes to great lengths to explain how to calculate the different amounts of oil used, types of oils and their qualities along with recipes too. Go check him out, he provides really clear photos and even videos showing and explaining his methods
