In our Occident lives, we're constantly exposed to a lot of unnatural stressors, like exhaust fumes, for instance, or processed food additives. Some are known to be toxic, some might be proven toxic in the future, but most of them are more or less harmless - except that they act as unnatural stressors to ourselves as living organism and thus, for example, make our immune system's task of keeping us healthy somewhat harder and prolongs the time it takes for our bodies to recover and super-compensate from our latest workouts a little.
The irony is, though, that worrying over these stressors might actually be more damaging for one's well-being that just ignoring the fact that they exists and go on happily with one's life in blissful ignorance! ;-)
Anyways, I don't fret over them but still prefer to cook my family's meals myself from quality ingredients over buying pre-fabricated foodstuffs and/or meals. Analogous (and due to skin rashes in my arm-pits) I've switched from conventional deodorants to pure potassium alum sticks. I've also experimented with making my own toothpaste with equal parts coconut oil and baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) and a generous amount of peppermint oil drops (still tastes terrible but you get used to it). Seems to do the job, although I'm not yet done evaluating it.
The latest experiment I've embarked on is to make my own shampoo bars. It begun with a friend pointing out the unnatural stressors in industrial shampoos and myself, probably because of that, noticing an buying a shampoo bar at one of our local area grocery stores. I've used that bar to wash my hair the last couple of weeks with good results. Cannot say I've experienced any of the transition troubles many sources on the Internet describes. But the same Internet searches also turned up an abundance of DIY recipes for shampoo bars and it seems like a cool thing to try.
However, most recipes calls for a mix of many fats and oils: olive oil, shea butter, ricin oil, etc, etc and with different saponification values for each kind of fat, that felt a bit daunting for a first-timer. Hence, I deliberately choose to listen to Mommy Potamus blog post
Coconut Oil Shampoo Bar Recipe we're she herself have had good result with a superfatted shampoo bar made of just coconut oil. It's an experiment, after all. If it doesn't work out, I will be one learning experience richer and have a bunch of soaps to try to find other uses for (how was it? Pure coconut soap dries skin out too much? Does that apply to hands to the same amount as it does it for the more sensetive face skin?).
Here's a picture from when I was about to set out on my quest:
Lye (sodium hydroxide) is not something to be taken lightly but not something to be overly scared of either. Ever used a drain cleaner? Ever gotten irritated eyes and/or nose from drain cleaner vapors? That would be lye reacting with water. In theory, one could use drain cleaner granulates when making soap, but in practice, it simply feels safer to buy pure lye instead. As long as you use non-reactive bowls - glass, stainless steel or quality plastic - you can use your usual kitchen ones as long as you clean them properly before using them again, first just with water, then wash them as usual.
The saponification number of coconut fat/oil seems to be 178 - 191 but most sources has pegged it to be 184 for organic coconut oil (although the webstore,
https://www.organicmakers.se/, where got my lye and coconut oil from uses 183) so I used 184. That means that for 1000 weight units of oil, 184 units of lye is needed to soapify it. However, one always want to superfat the soap a bit, to ensure that there are enough fat around to consume all of the lye. Furthermore, Mommy Potamus' recipe called for a 10% superfatted shampoo bar for normal hair, so that's what I aimed for.
I wanted to use 500 g of the coconut oil. Having it 10% superfatted makes for 500 / 1.1 = 454.54545454545454545454 g of coconut oil to saponify. With a saponification value of 184, that means we'll need 454.54545454545454545454 * (184/1000) or 83.63636363636363636363 g lye. Most soapmakers seems to be opting for a lye solution of 30% lye and 70% water, so with 83.63636363636363636363 g lye, we'll need (83.63636363636363636363 / 3) * 7 or 195.15151515151515151509 g water. But as my kitchen scale only have gram accuracy, I went for 500 g coconut oil, 84 g lye and 195 g water. Since I'm aiming for a 10% superfatted shampo, I have a good marginal for error and doesn't really need any scale with "drug-dealer accuracy".
1. I used some rapeseed oil to coat the silicon muffins tray I was going to use as soap forms. I'm not entirely sure this is actually needed, but better safe than sorry. It seems the most common modus operandi instead is to use one big rectangular form and then cut out individual bars out of it with a knife once it has settled, but I'll go for individual forms directly.
2. I weighted up 500 g coconut oil in the big bowl, 84 g lye in the measuring glass, and 195 g water in the little bowl.
3. With my glasses on and protective gloves on my hands, I went outdoor and carefully mixed the lye into the water and kept stirring with a steel whisker until the solution went clear and all of the lye granulates had been completely dissolved. Since the reaction between lye and water generates heat, my steel bowl was hot to the touch by now - which was nice since it was just below freezing outside today.
4. After waiting yet some minute to let the solution cool off a little, I went back inside and carefully poured it over the still solid chunks of coconut oil in the big bowl, then used the same steel whisker to stir until all of the coconut oil had melted.
5. Then I inserted the blending rod at an angle to trap as little air under the head as possible and ran it at full speed in short intervals, stirring the mixture with the rod head in between, to get a feel for how thick it had become. I thought it thickened a lot slower than it said it would in the different tutorials on the web, until I actually did the tracing test by lifting the rod and watching what happened with the droplets on the surface of the mixture. They stayed there without sinking down into the mixture so evidently, I had made it too thick - yet, to me, it seemed pretty thin so make a note:
thick enough it actually pretty thin!
6. When pouring the mixture into the forms, pretty thin comes in quite handy. I tried to get roughly the equal amount into each of the 12 muffin molds in the silicon tray, then used the silicon spatula to try to smooth out the tops of them, which wasn't easy and got noticeably harder over the few minutes I spent on it as the mixture clearly already solidified quickly. Here's how the final result looked:
7. Rumors has it that coconut oil soaps solidify faster than other fats, so apparently, one should be able to cut out individual bars after 6 to 10 hours. However, I put the tray away under an old kitchen towel and waited six hours before trying to pry the first "muffin of soap" out of the silicon tray. That proved pretty easy, although it got a bit messy due to mixture having ended up on the sides of the muffin molds:
Clearly, I wasn't very successful at smoothing out the tops of them... One can also see a yellow (mis-)colouring on the bottoms from the rapeseed oil. Next time, I might go for using washed cream cartons as molding forms instead and slicing out quadratic bars with a knife instead.
8. Now they're supposed to mature on the grid under the old kitchen towel for at least four weeks. That's the really frustrating part of soap-making. But before February 1st, I should be able to try to wash my hair with one of
