It’s also the time of year where splurge and make some extra special batches of soap. While I’ve really been in love with my last batch of 100% coconut oil soap, I wanted to make a batch of real luxury soap.
While just a plain, every day bar of soap can be luxurious, most people equate luxury with the luxury oils like shea butter, cocoa butter, jojoba, and some of the other liquid oils.
This recipe, called Double Butter, uses 25% butters. Because butters will dampen the lather of your soap some, I upped the coconut to 35% and balanced the recipe with some lard, olive and castor oils. Recipes with high percentages of butters come to trace quickly.
Using lard instead of palm oil or tallow as your “hard” oil helps slow things down. But I’ve included a vegetarian version of the recipe for you as well.
For this recipe, which makes 3 pounds of soap, I used:
- 4.5 ounces lard (10%)
- 15.6 ounces coconut oil (35%)
- 11.2 ounces olive oil (25%)
- 2.2 ounces castor oil (5%)
- 5.8 ounces cocoa butter (13%)
- 5.4 ounces shea butter (12%)
- 6.3 ounces lye (6% lye discount)
- 12.6 ounces water
- 2 ounces of fragrance or essential oil blend, I used my Lavender Dream blend with patchouli, orange and lavender essential oils
- 1/2 tsp. gold mica
- 1/2 tsp. brown mica
Substitute the 4.5 ounces of lard for 4.5 ounces of palm oil. The saponification values for the two oils are close enough that the lye amount doesn’t change. .
