My Vegan "Lard" Bar

Tried a new soap this morning in the shower, and I just had to write about it, so I'm taking a mini-break from the chemistry "lectures."

I bought some lard this past winter to make suet cakes for the bird feeders at school (I have a bird club that collects and sends data to the Cornell Institute of Ornithology through their Project FeederWatch Program).  Found out the hard way that was a mistake.  Lard melts WAY too easily. I ended up with an extra one pound container of lard for which I had no use.  I prefer to make soap from plant oils, but I didn't want the lard to go to waste, so I made a four bar batch of lard soap, concocting a recipe on Soapcalc.net that had the properties I wanted.  I also tested out a new FO - Nature's Garden Exotic Amazon Teakwood, as I wanted to try out a more manly scent for my husband.

Some people really love lard soap, and now I can see why. It makes a hard bar with thick, creamy lather. Not as bubbly as my usual recipe, but I really liked it for a change.  My husband liked the soap and the scent.  I loved the scent too; manly enough for a "men's line," yet it didn't make me feel like I bathed with Old Spice or something like that.  Now I had a problem.  I liked the soap, but still preferred to use plant oils and butters.  Lard is also a bit smelly to make soap out of, much like milk soaps can stink until they cure. When researching fatty acids for one of my earliest posts, I discovered that mango butter (as well as shea and cocoa butters) has a fatty acid profile similar to lard. The plant butters, however, have much higher amounts of ricinoleic acid, which should increase the lather compared to lard.  So I developed a mango butter soap recipe similar to my lard recipe (I had some mango butter on hand).  I tried a different FO (Nature's Garden Pineapple Paprika) that I thought would work well with the mango theme.  Finally tried the soap this morning, after a four or five week cure.  Impression?  Love it!  It has a lot of lovely, creamy lather much like the lard soap, maybe even better, and the FO smelled terrific. It feels just as hard as the lard soap, which is what I expected from my Soapcalc numbers.   The only downside is that mango butter isn't cheap, especially compared to lard.  But I think it makes a great vegan "lard" bar substitute.

I'm going to keep one of the mango butter bars around for about a year, as well as a lard bar,  to see what happens.  Mango, shea, and cocoa butters all have high amounts of linoleic acid, as does lard.  This fatty acid can make soap that is prone to getting DOS.  I want to see how long those bars will last for me.

Unfotunately, I'm not posting a picture of the soap.  The FO made the lye/oil mixture seize on me, so the bars are not especially pretty.  But that's another post.

Fragrance Oil Tests

I've done several rounds of fragrance oil (FO) tests in the past few weeks. I bought at least 30 samples of different FOs from several online sites, all to see which ones might be candidates for selling in the future. I made a one pound batch of my simplest recipe, and poured about one ounce per paper cup at light trace (hence more than one test batch). I used plastic droppers to put in approximately 1.5 ml of FO in each cup, and used popsicle sticks to stir in the FO.  That roughly equates to 0.7 ounces per pound of oil. Since I knew the FO's might discolor the soap, I made sure one cup had no FO.  Wow! It is amazing how much the FO can change the color of soap. One of the cups was as white as the cup without any FO, while the rest ranged from slightly creamier to dark brown. I knew that vanilla in the FO makes the soap turn various shades of tan to brown, depending upon the concentration of the vanilla, and I found that it doesn't take all that much to turn the soap brown.  Ironically, the "Wedding Cake" scent was the darkest of all. I wanted to make soap cupcakes for my students with that one, but I guess they'll just have to look like chocolate cupcakes!  I didn't take a picture of all 30 scents, but I did take a picture of the finalists, showing the range of discoloration.

The soap on the far left by itself has no FO. The darkest is the "wedding cake" FO.

This little experiment taught me that unless I don't care about the color of my soap, it is very important to see how the FO will change it. It is also important to know that the color change can occur over several days - to almost a week, so wait at least that long to determine the final effect.

As for scent, it became apparent that it too, changes over time, again over several days.  What it smells like out of the bottle is often not a good indication of what it will smell like once soaped. And several scents changed significantly for the better after a few days.

Lesson learned?  Test! Test! Test!

Note: My tests were done with CP soap.  Melt and pour is an entirely different animal. I'll get to that sometime in the future.