Coffee soap making made enjoyable at home
Probably you encountered soap making once in your life in your Chemistry undergraduate subject. The process is purely of Chemistry origin. In a simple laboratory experiment, the crude soap is composed of sodium or potassium salts of fatty acids that is made by reacting vegetable oils and/or animal fats with a strong basic solution (sodium hydroxide or potassium hydroxide, or generally called lye), and the whole process is called saponification. The reaction is a base hydrolysis of the fats and oils forming the anionic surfactant soap and glycerol.
Soap ideas are now creating different approach to the process of soap making. Two general process involves in soap making are the hot process and cold process. Cold process is the widely used one especially at home. It uses the saponification value of the fats and/or oils to be used so that the amount of lye is analytically prepared to be right in the process. Excess lye can cause skin burns or irritation and lower lye value can cause greasiness in the soap.
Equipped with the right knowledge, soap making is now made easier and exciting at home. For those who want to make a coffee soap for the first time, you will need the following items; 113 grams each for coconut oil and olive oil 227 grams of soy bean oil, 142 grams of coffee (instead of the typically used water) and 57 grams of lye (take precautions as sodium hydroxide is a caustic solution, it is better to wear protective eye glasses and gloves)
Upon completion of the said ingredients, let’s proceed to the coffee soap making proper.
• Measure the desired weights of the coffee and lye in separate pitchers.
• Pour the lye into the coffee, try to prevent them from splashing.
• Lightly swirl the combined solution by a wooden spoon, allow cooling to around 100° – 110°F.
• Heat all oils, melt if some of them are solid, and cool to 100° – 110°F.
• Check whether the temperature of the lye solution and melted/heated oils identical (or less than 10°F in difference). If so, mix the solution together by pouring thin stream of lye solution into the melted/heated oils. Ensure a constant swirling.
• Continue with constant stirring as the mixture thickens and you can see “trailing”. This will last for less than an hour. You can add essential or fragrance oils and coffee at light trace if you like.
• Pour the liquid crude soap into a plastic mold, cover and wrap with towel.
• Place in a warm surroundings for 48 hours.
• Remove the soap in the mold. You now produced a coffee soap block. Using a knife, slice the block to make soap bars.
Soap making really consumes large amount of time. However, it’s worthy to try this to create that coffee soap for home use of hand cleansers.
Jen Hopkins has worked in the skin care industry for years. She maintains websites about home soap making}, and how to make soap. If you want to contact her, you can use the contact form at one of her sites.
This entry was posted on Sunday, February 21st, 2010 at 4:32 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.