Which kind of lye?

by Ariann
(Philippines )

We are making a soap for our investigatory project. We are second year students. We made soap that failed.

We lacked information regarding the procedure. Problem was the components did not really look as one. The soybean oil did not mix with other ingredients.

A friend of ours tried using liquid lye and the soap did not harden. When they used crystals, it hardened. Do we really need crystal lye to make our soap hard?

Answer:

It is certainly possible to make soap using liquid lye but you will have to adjust the water and lye amount in the recipe since the liquid lye already has the water added to it.

All of my recipes use lye crystals/flakes and you would have to convert the recipes over to liquid lye.

Try Majestic Mountain Sage's Lye Calculator .....they have the option to make a recipe with liquid lye. You just have to know what the lye concentration is of the solution you are using.

Good luck,
Cathy