Hi this is Teri from Tree Marie Soapworks. Today I'm going to be showing you
a little bit about SoapCalc. A while back I asked in one of my videos if
anybody would be interested and I got a lot of responses so I'm going to show
you how to put a recipe in and a little bit of background on the little areas
that you have to fill in. so let's get started.
SoapCalc is actually found at soapcalc.net and when you go to soapcalc.net
it will look like this and then you just go to 'recipe calculator' and then each
one of these sections has a number by it and you can click on these numbers to
read a little bit of background information about each of the areas.
This one explains a little bit about sodium hydroxide and potassium hydroxide
normally you're going to use sodium hydroxide and that's the default and
this is just if you're going to use bar soap, where KOH is about liquid soap and
and we're not concerned with that so we just keep it as the default of NaOH and
then this one I usually use ounces a lot of people may use grams actually my
recipe when I make my soap I use grams but it makes more sense in my head being
here in America to use ounces because I know those amounts so I keep this at
ounces this number, when you're entering a recipe from somewhere else you're not
going to necessarily know this number or you will get this number by putting in
all the values so you don't really need to know this number. This is the weight
of the water. What I didn't know when I started in making soap, is that the
water doesn't really matter it's not like a has to be a set in stone thing. I
wish I would have known to discount water more than I did at the beginning.
This number 38 is very high and it's normally just used for hot process but
if you look here it says that 'the simplest way to determine the amount of
water used in your recipe is this way water is percentage of oil' which I
normally used this way, 'water is a percentage of oils' but it says it's
recommended that beginners use this method and
use the default value of 38%' and that's really really high! A lot of times
recipes you'll find on the internet, like say Brambleberry, when I was figuring out
their recipes and putting them into SoapCalc a lot of their recipes they used 33%.
so 33 just became my standard number here, but as I learned more I learned
that when you lower this number, your soap comes out better it comes out more
creamy, less grainy, less glycerin rivers, so the higher this number is the more
glycerin rivers you tend to get. This number right here 'as a percentage of
oils,' so this would be 38% of 16, if this was your total number of
oils so your weight of oils, and then it takes that percentage, so normally my
recipes are 25% but if you're new you might want to start with 33% and
just kind of work your way down. I go down as low as 20%. But I usually don't
go any lower than that. Here you can also use our percentage, and I don't normally
bother with that, but I'll show you it when we go to the recipe, that it'll show
the percentage and you can start to get familiar with those values as well.
This is a ratio and some people use ratios so my 25% usually ends up being a ratio of
1.8 : one lye for the water : lye ratio. You can use as low as 1 : 1.
A case that you would do that is if you're adding, say you're adding milk or beer to
your soap, but you want to just use water to dissolve your lye, so you want to use
the least water as possible and then to make up for that amount that you
normally use, like say it's a difference of two ounces, like from the 1 : 1 ratio
to whatever you normally use, you would use that 2 ounces and make it up in milk
or beer and you would add that to your oil as your melted oils so that's the
only case where I would use 1 : 1 ratio otherwise it would set up
extremely fast it would cure fast - because there's not a lot of
water to evaporate out of it, but it's something for more advanced soap makers.
This section right here is your super fat, if you have 0% right here it means
you shouldn't have any lye left over. Your oils should neutralize all the lye,
but you got to leave a little room for error, so we always super fat our soaps.
They do 3% once in a while I see when you really want a lot of bubbles but as
more standard is 5 or 6% or I see a lot of 8% and 10%. But just keep in mind that
more you super fat, it's going to be more moisturizing but it's also going to weight
down the bubbles more, so you got to just find your balance of what you want to do
here. Ok so the fragrance, they figure that fragrance of per pound of oils most
manufacturers, they suggest their fragrance per pound of soap, so in this
case, I just zero this out and once I figure my amount, I will just manually
calculate that later so, I'll show you that in the next screen. Ok, for this
section, is all your oils, and we don't need to get into too much depth here, but
if you want to know different characteristics of different oils, you
can see, it gives you the value of one oil right here, but then when you
do the recipe it'll give you the value of all of them, and just for your own
information, these top four right here are your saturated oils where they're
going to be your hard acids and these bottom ones are your unsaturated or
their mono or poly saturated acids they're usually your liquid oils but all
of your liquid oils like we have avocado oil that we put up here, they all do have
a little bit of hard acids in them they're not all made up of completely liquid
acids, like your olive oil has, see I'll show you olive oil, it has palmitic acid in
it as well and a little steric,so that's why when you put it in your bowl you can
still see streaks until it the streaks are coming from the palmitic
and stearic acids, so that's just a little background on these and you understand
this more as you start to make your own recipes but right away this doesn't
really need to mean much to you. Okay so this section is when you actually make
your recipe and I picked a random recipe from the internet. And I'm just gonna put
this in with you, because most of the time recipes will not tell you what
their water percentage is or any of these numbers or, they won't tell you
what super fat they used this you could figure out just by adding up the oils,
but you don't have to because you just put them in here and then they'll add it
up for you. This random recipe I picked from the internet. I'm just gonna show
you how to put it in. Okay you're not putting percentages in you're putting
the actual amount, so you changed it over to ounces. So for the first, well first
we're gonna add in all the oils. So first oil we have is olive oil, and you can
double-click or you can click it and then plus to add it in
there, if you don't like it, you can subtract it out. So we're gonna do double
click, olive oil, next is coconut oil. Coconut oil is usually the it's almost
always the 76 degree I've never actually seen it in 92 degree, so that would be
your coconut oil. Next is palm oil and then palm kernel oil so, palm oil palm
kernel oil, and I use the flakes. And after that we have sweet almond oil,
which is under almond oil sweet, and the last one is mango butter,
mango seed butter. Okay so now we'll put in the amounts. And we
have, I'll just put in the amounts real quick 30, and you hit the tab to go to the next
one, 15, 9, 6, 3, and 3. Okay so we've put in everything we need
to put in. Now we'll say calculate recipe and then it does it updates so it has
all of your amounts over here now and it has your ratio over here but we'll show
you that on the next page. So you say 'multiple tabs' and then 'view or print
recipe.' So now this is where you make your recipe you would put your name of
the recipe up here and then you would put your additives down here, and then a
little instructions, things you want to remember, and then after you're done I
would add some notes to of, what went good, what didn't go good. You could track
down why things happened. So I want to make it a little note on this. Your
saturated : unsaturated. The saturated are the hard oils, so they're going to
be the ones to set up quicker, so if you look at this number right here and this
number these, these are, it's out of a hundred. If this is higher than 50 then
it probably is not a good recipe for swirls. So you can always look at this
look at a recipe that you found on the Internet and depending on what you get
right here it's probably not going to be good for swirls if this number is higher
than 50. It just will set up faster so that's something that it's always good
to know. Okay this value right here your INS value, I don't hear many people
talking about this, as to what it means, but I read in a book, an older soap book,
that this value right here is supposed to be near 160. This number being near
160 is usually a good so but not always. If you're doing out just a 100 percent
coconut oil soap and you super fat at 20 percent. Your numbers are going to be way
off right here. No where near, I think it ends up being
high. Also if you're using, doing a Bastille where you have a high percentage of
olive oil, that ends up changing this where it's still a good soap but
the numbers, the INS numbers don't come out good. Okay, so
another thing we want to talk about is, we put these numbers in, and look how big
our batch is. This is for a 5 pound mold. So we want to use it for our mold
that's little smaller. So I'm going to show you how to change it to your mold
size. Well first before we do that, let's figure out our fragrance what percentage
of fragrance they use for this. So they use four ounces so we can figure out
that by just dividing, 4 divided by this number right here. So let me do
that real quick so 4 divided by 91.9, and that is 4.3%.
So we'll just say 4%. So just remember that they used four percent, so
when we go back to adjust our recipe, we will use 4% fragrance. Okay, but
One thing we didn't look at is these numbers right here. They don't give these
numbers when they give you recipes on the internet. So, well they do give you
the water but you don't know what percentage they used, so I figured this
at 25% 'water as a percentage of oil weight' well, they use, their amount
of water was 22 ounces, so we know that they're a percentage was higher, so we
just gotta kind of guess until we get it. Also, the lye well, let's do one at a time.
Let's figure out the water so we'll go over here and I'm gonna guess
33% because normally, that's a good rule of thumb that a lot of people use.
So we'll try 33. And then we have just calculated again, and view again. So okay,
here we can call this 22 because they round too, so this could be 22.
right here. We'll call that good on the water, but the lye, they used 9.5,
so actually we probably used the same percentage 9.5, so
they used the 5%. So now that we've got their recipe figured out right
here, we know their 'water as a percentage of oils' and we also know their
super fat. We can change this recipe size to our size. So, we go back over here, and,
if we know the amount of oils that we normally use, we can put that in here.
Well first we have to change up to percentage, so this is their numbers, now
we know their percentages, so we change it to percentages. Now it will let us
change this number right here. So if you haven't you SoapCalc before you might
not know your total weight of oils. But in the past, just look up a recipe that
you've used for that same mold and, like for my mold, my 10 bar mold, I always use
33.5, because that's what I normally use for my mold, so now that we know all of
this stuff, we will just say 'calculate,' and 'view' and so this would be our new
recipe. Although, see I knew that mine normally says about 45 or 46 here. It's
because I don't normally use this much water in my recipe. So I want to go back
and fix that. So my recipe, I usually use 25 right here. And that will fix that
amount, and make it closer to what I normally use the then I'll figure my sodium
lactate next, which is really easy. So sodium lactate is one teaspoon per pound
of oils. Well this figures your pounds with oils,
so my pounds of oils are 2.1, So it's easy to figure it would just be 2.1
teaspoons of sodium lactate. So then next would be your fragrance. Remember we
figured out they used 4% fragrance? Now I usually use five or six percent. You want
to make sure that you can use that high of amount. You need to check the IFRA
number for soap. For this one they use just 4%, so we just need to figure out
what 4% is. So you just take this number or this number or mostly, I do both
because I I always use the grams when I'm actually measuring out the
ingredients, so I'll just use grams. So we have 1323 and then you just do times 4%
or .04, however you want to do it. Okay so it would be 53 grams.
And just put in fragrance oil, and then you want to know what percentage did
that was, that I used, so I can see it easy without having to figure it out.
Okay and then next you would put your colorants down here. We're not going to
get into that today but just this is for your additives. So say you're using clay
in this recipe, and clay's recommendation is for one teaspoon per pound of oils
as well. So then you would just use this number again. Say it's a half a teaspoon
per pound of oils, that's another easy one to figure out because you would just
use half of this amount. Just having this figure it out for you makes it a lot
easier. I think I've covered most everything that I wanted to cover here I
would just put your title up here and your ingredients here and then here,
I would just note what swirl you're doing, like, if I'm doing the Taiwan circling
swirl, I'm gonna divide it up by three, so just say divide batter by three. And just
put all the notes you want to know, like, I always force it through gel on the
heating pad. Usually note if I put it on medium or high and then I pu,t later I
write how long I had an high. I can put two how long I had it covered up. Here in
Indiana, it's humid, every time I uncover my soap before two days, I always wish I
had done it for two days. It just seems like it always comes out better.
but other places, if you do a good water discount and you put your soap through
gel, sometimes they can they cut it in six hours after, so it just it it really
just depends on how much humidity is in the air. So you can just note things like
that and kind of figure things out, just by taking good notes. This sheet then,
I print out so you can say 'print recipe' and your print dialog box will come up,
and you can either print it or you can save it as a PDF file. And when I print
these I'll just put my recipe number and it prints the date on there already but
if I end up making it a different day I'll just cross that out and put the new
date on it.And I keep it in a binder and just keep all of my recipes even if I do
the same one again I just want to make notes on how, I usually tweak it a little
bit, so I want to know what I did different so I'd have a new one of these.
So I hope this helps you out and if it's confusing to you, you can let me know
what questions you have, and I hope you have a good day thank you! :)