I must confess that I got distracted.  Yes, I did!   We have a small handmade soap company  and I really want to offer liquid soap as well as handmade bar soap.   I’m so close to launching a liquid soap line but got distracted when I ran across a different method of making liquid soap on a handmade soap making forum that I belong to.  While I found this different method interesting I was hesitant to try it.  Instead of adding potassium hydroxide which is the alkali used for liquid soap making to the water phase, you replace the water with vegetable glycerin and add the potassium hydroxide to the glycerin.  It’s a quick and painless method.   Usually, it takes me several hours to get to the point that I have a workable soap paste.   When using glycerin in place of water the chemical reaction happens so much faster and I’ve got a nice solid translucent paste within an hour or so.   It’s that quick!  Also, taking a 2% discount, there is no need to neutralize and I still end up with a clear liquid soap after dilution.   Has there been a learning curve?  Yep!  Sure has and I’ve got a couple gallons of dish soap to prove it!   Some of the essential oils I added turned the diluted liquid soap to a nice thick gel after sitting for a while so I learned to work through this adding a bit more glycerin and letting it sit.  The glycerin dissolved the gel and made it fluid again.   It is normal for a true liquid soap to be pretty thin.  Thin enough that you can squirt it out of a bottle.   I happen to like a thicker soap and so have been tinkering with how to get it.   I tried different vegetable gums, adding borax and reducing the amount of water used to dilute the soap paste.   Using the normal method of making liquid soap, I could reduce the water quite a bit but with the glycerin method I found I needed a bit more water in dilution to keep the soap from reverting back to paste.   Borax works but I really wanted to avoid using it.   What I ended up doing is making a 20% sodium chloride (table salt) solution and adding a dropper full at a time to the diluted soap stock.  Using too heavy of a hand will turn the soap cloudy so there is a fine line on how thick you can take it and not get cloudy soap.  I was able to use the salt solution with a coconut oil percentage of 20% in my formula.  I have never used a salt solution before but have read that it won’t work on a liquid soap formula with a high percentage of coconut oil.  In my case, it seemed to work great so I don’t know how high is high.   I really like using the glycerin liquid soap making method.  It’s a time saver and has produced some beautiful soap for me.   Took a lot of testing but I think I’ve got the process down now.  Patience is not one of my virtues but I have been forced to go slow and test, test and test some more.

Here I’ve got warmed oils and the potassium hydroxide added to the vegetable glycerin.

The lye solution has been stick blended into the warmed oils.

                                                                                             Tracing…

                                                                                    We have bubbles..which means done!

To get to the bubble stage only took about 5 minutes.  The soap is done and after I put the lid on and came back in about an hour I had paste and it tested neutral with the  phenolphthalein.   I had whipped air into the soap which accounts for the cream color but underneath was all clear paste.   So much for 24 oz test batches.    Not the easiest to work with but better than wasting a lot of material.

And here is the final test batch of paste diluted, thickened and scented with Eucalyptus, Spearmint and Sweet Orange essential oils.    Perfect!

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