Proposal:
Essential Question:How is soap made?
Materials:
Ingredients:
Instructions:
Clean up:
When you’re done making soap, always clean your equipment that has been exposed to lye. You can neutralize the lye with white vinegar, then wash the equipment well as you normally would. For the rest of it, let it sit for several days. Why? Because when you first make soap, it’s all fat and lye. You’ll be washing forever and you could burn your hands on the residual lye. If you wait, it becomes soap and all it takes to clean it is a soak in hot water.
Sources:
Materials:
- mixing bowls(Stainless steel, tempered glass or enamel). Don’t use copper or aluminum, they will react with the lye. Some plastics may melt, so don’t use plastic bowls.
- soap mold or silicone baking pan
- pint and a quart canning jar
- newspaper(to cover work area)
- stainless steel thermometer that reads between 90° and 200°(candy or cooking thermometer)
- an old towel(to cover soap when drying)
- Metal spoons for mixing
- immersion blender (optional because it can be stirred with spoon)
- plastic wrap(to cover soap when drying)
- parchment paper or baking rack(to dry soap)
- soap cutter or knife
- wax paper or airtight container(to store soap)
Ingredients:
- ⅔ cup coconut oil – to produce good lather (melt first before measuring)
- ⅔ cup olive oil – which makes a hard and mild bar
- ⅔ cup other liquid oil – like almond oil, grapeseed, sunflower of safflower oil
- ¼ cup lye – also called 100% sodium hydroxide
- ¾ cup cool water – use distilled or purified
- 15-20 drops essential oils or around a teaspoon per batch
Instructions:
- Cover your work area with newspaper. Put your gloves and other protective wear on. Measure your water into the quart canning jar. Have a spoon ready. Measure your lye, making sure you have exactly ¼ cup. Slowly pour the lye into the water, stirring as you go. Stand back while you stir to avoid the fumes. When the water starts to clear, you can allow it to sit while you move to the next step.
- In the pint jar, add your three oils together. They should just make a pint. Heat in a microwave for about a minute, or place the jar of oils in a pan of water to heat. Check the temperature of your oils – it should be about 120° or so. Your lye should have come down by then to about 120°. Wait for both to cool somewhere between 95° and 105°. This is critical for soap making. Too low and it’ll come together quickly, but be coarse and crumbly.
- When both the lye and oils are at the right temperature, pour the oils into a mixing bowl. Slowly add the lye, stirring until it’s all mixed. Stir by hand for a full 5 minutes. It’s very important to get as much of the lye in contact with as much of the soap as possible. After about 5 minutes, you can keep stirring or you can use an immersion blender . The soap mixture will lighten in color and become thick. When it looks like vanilla pudding it’s at “trace” and you’re good to go.
- Add your herbs, essential oils or other additions at this point. Stir thoroughly to combine. Pour the mixture into mold(s) and cover with plastic wrap. Set in an old towel and wrap it up. This will keep the residual heat in and start the saponification process. Saponification is the process of the base ingredients becoming soap.
- After 24 hours, check your soap. If it’s still warm or soft, allow it to sit another 12-24 hours. When it’s cold and firm, turn it out onto a piece of parchment paper or baking rack. If using a loaf pan as your mold, cut into bars at this point. Allow soap to cure for 4 weeks or so. Be sure to turn it over once a week to expose all the sides to air (which is not necessary if using a baking rack).
- When your soap is fully cured, wrap it in wax paper or keep it in an airtight container. Handmade soap creates its own glycerin, which is a humectant, pulling moisture from the air. It should be wrapped to keep it from attracting dust and debris with the moisture
- Gloves and goggles
- Lye can eat holes in fabric and cause burns on your skin. Be extra careful when using lye.
- When you mix the lye with water, it will heat up and fume for about 30 seconds to a minute. It may cause a choking sensation in your throat(it’s not permanent and will go away after a few minutes)
- Always add lye to water (not water to lye), and start stirring right away. If allowed to clump on the bottom, it could heat up all at once and cause an explosion.
- Even though lye is caustic and dangerous to work with, after it reacts with the oils in your soap (through a process called saponification), no lye will remain in your finished soap
Clean up:
When you’re done making soap, always clean your equipment that has been exposed to lye. You can neutralize the lye with white vinegar, then wash the equipment well as you normally would. For the rest of it, let it sit for several days. Why? Because when you first make soap, it’s all fat and lye. You’ll be washing forever and you could burn your hands on the residual lye. If you wait, it becomes soap and all it takes to clean it is a soak in hot water.
Sources:
Reflection:
Looking Back:
When we were done with mixing all the materials for the soap together, we got this goopy, pudding-like substance. at this point we had to move fast to put the substance in a mold or else it would harden and we cant mold it at all. My group didn't get to buy a mold because it would be too expensive to buy one if we were only going to make soap once. So we ended up using a small box and that ended up too big so we moved to using a plastic container lined in a plastic bag so it wouldn't stick to the container. It wasn't a great shape so our soap didn't turn out looking nice. In the slideshow above, you can see how it looked like, to me it looked like pancake mix.
Looking Beyond:
Saponification is the chemical reaction that happens when soap is being made. The reaction happens when oil and fats are mixed with a strong alkali. The strong alkali is usually lye which is also known as sodium hydroxide or potassium hydroxide. Oil has fatty acids which are carboxylic acids consisting of a long hydrocarbon chain at one end and a carboxyl group at the other end. Long chains of the fatty acids usually occur as triglycerides and are found in fats and oils. Triglycerides are esters of fatty acids and are formed by combining fatty acids with glycerol. When the fatty acids react with the glycerol, they form triesters of glycerol or triglyceride. During that process, the water molecules in the reaction is eliminated. When triglycerides in fat and oil react with the water molecules in the sodium hydroxide or potassium hydroxide, they are converted into soap and glycerin.
Looking Inward:
We used the soap and I think it worked out pretty well. The soap made our skin really soft and it felt as if it took off most of the oils on our skin. It also came out to be pretty bubbly which made it fun to use. One downside to me was that the smell of the soap wasn't really appealing, it smelt a lot like olive oil and not the lavender that we added. I think that since we decided to mix the oils in a immersion blender and if we didn't do that then it would have taken forever to get the oils to be at trace and without it being at trace then our soap wouldn't have turn out as good. I think I performed really good in this lab because I took charge of the lab and directed everyone what to do. I think I could have done a better job with getting my group to know what they are doing by making them help me with the proposal because then they'll actually have to educate themselves before writing the proposal. Having them do that would have helped me so much because I felt as if I was the only one knowing what was going on.
Looking Outward:
For this lab I worked with Daisy, Zion and Erika. I think we performed okay as a group. Most of the time I felt like I was doing most of the work because no one really helped me with the proposal. Also a couple days before we did the lab, I told my group to read the proposal thoroughly and when we did the lab, it showed that none of them even read the proposal beforehand. When we were doing the lab, they told me to slow down because they didn't know what was going on at the moment, but we were running low on time so I just had to keep on going to get the lab done. I was mostly the director of the lab tell everyone what to do and what to get next and watching over everything making sure everything is running smoothly.
Looking Forward:
If I were to do this lab again, I would for sure get soap molds!! Also, I would use the immersion blender right to mix everything instead of mixing it with a spoon because it would make the process more faster. The website I read told me that we could use a spoon if we want so we did that and 20 minutes pasted and we didn't see any progress in the soap so that was when we moved to use the blender and in under five minutes, we got the texture that we wanted. I wouldn't mind working with these people again but probably not all of them in the same group. I feel they all just assumed that I would do all the work and they'll be there for the lab and I didn't like that so I assume that if were with other people, the work would be distributed better. When researching about making soap, I was that there were many processes to make soap and different types of soaps. To continue the soap making lab, I would like to try to make glycerin soap, goat milk soap, the hot process of making soap and even laundry soap.
Takeaway:
In this lab I tookaway that if one method doesn't work, another method will for example, mixing with a spoon didn't work so we used the immersion blender. Also I learned that I need to be more better at distributing work evenly among my group so no one would be doing nothing or anyone is doing too much. I also learned that it is pretty easy to be cleaning while doing the lab, I saw that if someone wasn't doing anything while we were doing the lab I sent them to clean the materials that we were done using so we didn't have to clean much when we were done with the lab.
When we were done with mixing all the materials for the soap together, we got this goopy, pudding-like substance. at this point we had to move fast to put the substance in a mold or else it would harden and we cant mold it at all. My group didn't get to buy a mold because it would be too expensive to buy one if we were only going to make soap once. So we ended up using a small box and that ended up too big so we moved to using a plastic container lined in a plastic bag so it wouldn't stick to the container. It wasn't a great shape so our soap didn't turn out looking nice. In the slideshow above, you can see how it looked like, to me it looked like pancake mix.
Looking Beyond:
Saponification is the chemical reaction that happens when soap is being made. The reaction happens when oil and fats are mixed with a strong alkali. The strong alkali is usually lye which is also known as sodium hydroxide or potassium hydroxide. Oil has fatty acids which are carboxylic acids consisting of a long hydrocarbon chain at one end and a carboxyl group at the other end. Long chains of the fatty acids usually occur as triglycerides and are found in fats and oils. Triglycerides are esters of fatty acids and are formed by combining fatty acids with glycerol. When the fatty acids react with the glycerol, they form triesters of glycerol or triglyceride. During that process, the water molecules in the reaction is eliminated. When triglycerides in fat and oil react with the water molecules in the sodium hydroxide or potassium hydroxide, they are converted into soap and glycerin.
Looking Inward:
We used the soap and I think it worked out pretty well. The soap made our skin really soft and it felt as if it took off most of the oils on our skin. It also came out to be pretty bubbly which made it fun to use. One downside to me was that the smell of the soap wasn't really appealing, it smelt a lot like olive oil and not the lavender that we added. I think that since we decided to mix the oils in a immersion blender and if we didn't do that then it would have taken forever to get the oils to be at trace and without it being at trace then our soap wouldn't have turn out as good. I think I performed really good in this lab because I took charge of the lab and directed everyone what to do. I think I could have done a better job with getting my group to know what they are doing by making them help me with the proposal because then they'll actually have to educate themselves before writing the proposal. Having them do that would have helped me so much because I felt as if I was the only one knowing what was going on.
Looking Outward:
For this lab I worked with Daisy, Zion and Erika. I think we performed okay as a group. Most of the time I felt like I was doing most of the work because no one really helped me with the proposal. Also a couple days before we did the lab, I told my group to read the proposal thoroughly and when we did the lab, it showed that none of them even read the proposal beforehand. When we were doing the lab, they told me to slow down because they didn't know what was going on at the moment, but we were running low on time so I just had to keep on going to get the lab done. I was mostly the director of the lab tell everyone what to do and what to get next and watching over everything making sure everything is running smoothly.
Looking Forward:
If I were to do this lab again, I would for sure get soap molds!! Also, I would use the immersion blender right to mix everything instead of mixing it with a spoon because it would make the process more faster. The website I read told me that we could use a spoon if we want so we did that and 20 minutes pasted and we didn't see any progress in the soap so that was when we moved to use the blender and in under five minutes, we got the texture that we wanted. I wouldn't mind working with these people again but probably not all of them in the same group. I feel they all just assumed that I would do all the work and they'll be there for the lab and I didn't like that so I assume that if were with other people, the work would be distributed better. When researching about making soap, I was that there were many processes to make soap and different types of soaps. To continue the soap making lab, I would like to try to make glycerin soap, goat milk soap, the hot process of making soap and even laundry soap.
Takeaway:
In this lab I tookaway that if one method doesn't work, another method will for example, mixing with a spoon didn't work so we used the immersion blender. Also I learned that I need to be more better at distributing work evenly among my group so no one would be doing nothing or anyone is doing too much. I also learned that it is pretty easy to be cleaning while doing the lab, I saw that if someone wasn't doing anything while we were doing the lab I sent them to clean the materials that we were done using so we didn't have to clean much when we were done with the lab.