I need a little help!

Jbbennett

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Nov 2, 2019
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I am trying to enter my shampoo bar recipe into the Soapmakingfriend calculator and I am having some trouble.

The parts I am having trouble with is masterbatch lye, amount of liquid in recipe, and the superfats. Can anyone help me convert my recipe to the calculator?? any help is greatly appreciated!!

my recipe:

water 6 oz
lye 2.30 oz

coconut oil 6.40 oz 40%
avocado oil 6.40 oz 40%
shea butter 1.60 oz 10%
castor oil 1.60 oz 10%

salt 1-2 oz
 

Yooper

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Firs, I don’t think you are masterbatching the lye. That means to make a specific concentration of lye water up in advance for all of your batches. If you are using 6 ounces of water and 2.3 ounces of lye, that’s a specific amount not a master batch. So leave that part blank.

Net, since you have a “set” recipe, you’ll have to sort of reverse engineer it and that can be tricky. What I would do is add the oils in percentages, and then simply click “5% superfat” and see if the calculator gives you 2.3 ounces of lye. If not, go up or down with the superfat amount until you get 2.3 ounces of lye in the results.

Water amount is totally immaterial, so don’t consider that as an entry You need at least twice as much water as lye to dissolve the lye, but other than that, no recipe can tell you how much water to use. YOU tell the calculator how much water you want to use, if that makes sense. Many people will use water in the amount of 2 times or 2.5 times the amount of lye, so I’d use 5.75 ounces of water- so you are right in there. So you could use 2.5 for the amount of water to lye in the calculator and it would work great.
 

Jbbennett

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Nov 2, 2019
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2
Thanks for the reply Yooper!

To be honest I still have no where near any understanding of how this calculator works...

I don't see weight measurements in section 3, I don't know what difference the percentage of superfat means, and if it will effect my recipe if i change the value.. when I converted the oils to percentages it changed the weights of the recipe. The whole calculator is beyond my understanding, it would be helpful if there was a tutorial on how to use it but I can't seem to enter a simple recipe into it with hopes of improving my soap :(
 

Yooper

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I don’t know what you mean about not seeing the weight measurements in section 3- can you elaborate on that?

Superfat means the amount of excess fats in the soap that aren’t saponified (turned into soap) by the lye. It’s a percentage of the extra fat. A good rule of thumb is 5%, but in some recipes it may be more and in laundry some it’s much less (like 0-1%).

The idea of a soap calculator is to help your formulate your recipes to give you the qualities you want, and to ensure it’s not lye heavy. Other people may make recipes that are great, or that are terrible, so you want to check it with a lye calculator to make sure its not lye heavy. You’d enter the ingredients, and have to play with the calculator to see the results, if the recipe creator didn’t give you the actual amounts. One persons “6 ounces” of lye and “7 ounces of water” may be a terrible idea, but the only way to know is to check it through a lye calculator.

In a place like Soapmakingfriend, the recipe is already IN a calculator, so those type of recipes are easiest to use and understand when you are just starting out.
 
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