Potassium Hydroxide VS. Sodium Hydroxide in soap making

If you're fairly new to soap making, like me, you might be wondering if you could interchange potassium and sodium hydroxide. The answer is depends. It depends on what you are looking for in your soap and if you are prepared to deal with outcome.

First you need to know a little about soap making history to help you in your decision making processes. Back when soap making started there were probably as many opinions about how it should be made as there were families. One of the most common was to make soap was with ashes from a fire that were boiled. Boiling the ashes of a fire, particularly hardwood, would produce pot ash or potassium hydroxide. The potassium hydroxide was the active ingredient that would help saponify the oils and fats (saponify, or saponification, is a more recent term meaning to turn into soap.). A lot of these older recipes used different techniques to tell when you had reached saponification, but there was no numerical standard.

More recently scientist have continued to do what they do best, experiment, and have produced saponification tables for different oils and fats. These tables show how much lye, or sodium hydroxide, is needed to saponify the specified oils and fats. Some tables are in grams and some in ounces. To make this process even easier, so you don't have to do it by hand, some websites provide a "lye calculator" that adds up the amount of lye you need to saponify the oils you choose. It is truly much more simple today than it was in the days of the pioneers. Still, there are some questions that aren't easily answered.

 If you are like me and have some background in chemistry, but not in soap, you might think that this process is similar to polymerization and that the only part that really matters is the hydroxide. The truth is that saponification is dependent on the hydroxide but also acts as a salt. Therefore, you will get different results depending on which hydroxide you use. Typically you will get a harder soap from sodium hydroxide than from potassium hydroxide. Older recipes that used pot ash would typically have you add salt, sodium chloride, to harden the soap. One other difference is that you tend to get more lather from the potassium hydroxide than the sodium hydroxide.

I want to make a shaving soap and do it all myself. I have read several different articles and a lot of them seem to mention that there is potassium in shaving soap because it helps give a better lather, but none of them seem to mention the softer soap. I tried using just olive oil and used 100% sodium hydroxide, 50% sodium hydroxide 50% potassium hydroxide, and 100% potassium hydroxide in three different batches. The first batch was a little soft but hardened up after some time curing, while the second batch was like mush and the third just stayed a liquid. It turns out that olive oil produces a soft low lather soap anyway, which made it less than ideal for my test, so it was hard to get it to lather. However, even with the low amount of lather I noticed that the 50/50 mixture produced a better lather than the 100% sodium hydroxide.

So if you want a bar of soap you should probably stick to sodium hydroxide, but if you want a liquid soap us potassium hydroxide. However, if you are looking for lathering characteristics look first at the properties of the oils, because that will make your biggest difference, and then pick your hydroxide. I personally will be experimenting more with a blend of the two and trying different oils to produce the best lather for shaving. I hoped this helps.

Raw and unrefined..... Shea butter that is.

Have you noticed that the world is going "natural", "unrefined" and "organic"? Chances are you have come across at least a few of these products. My first major exposure to these crazes was in the produce section. I once worked as a "produce boy" and had to be able to explain the products to customers. Thankfully most people that were looking for organic food knew enough that the only questions I got was where to find it. I knew enough to know that it is a rip-off!
For those of you that have only been exposed to the mainstream fads surrounding "natural", "unrefined" and "organic" products you probably think that they are somehow "better" or are for those that are concerned with nature. If this is your idea of these products I would encourage you to do some digging, because that is not always the case. I was skeptical myself when I first came across raw Shea butter so I did some digging. I was convinced enough to buy some to try.
If you search "benefits of raw shea butter" you will get a lot of pages. I have read about Shea butter evening skin tone, reducing redness from sun burn, absorbing in skin quickly, accelerating healing of cuts, moisturizing the scalp and eliminating dandruff, anti-inflammatory properties and the lists goes on and on. While I don't know if all of these claims are true from personal experience I do know that Shea butter is popular among lotions and creams and can be spendy! If you are a girl you are probably familiar with this, or if you are around girls a lot. One claim that I could relate to was that refinement of Shea butter got rid of many of its useful qualities.
Having done organic chemistry I know that natural compounds are often very complex, take a long time to make and don't take much to destroy. Generally there are two levels of refinement. The first involves melting the Shea butter and filtering it through clay. This will remove most of the natural yellow color, which varies in every batch, making it more white and also removes much of the smell. That right there tells me there is a possibility some of the benefits are gone. The organic compounds that give the raw butter its color and smell probably provide some of its benefits as well. Further refining can be done to totally remove the smell and make the Shea butter white and odorless. This is done by filtering it with hexane, which is an organic solvent, and further removes organic compounds.
So I decided try the raw Shea butter for myself. The smell of it cannot be described adequately with words; you just have to smell it for yourself. My personal experience with it reminds me of vegetable oil and some kind of nut, perhaps peanuts, it is an earthy smell. So far I have used it on my skin by itself, and a little goes a LONG ways, and I have made a whipped body butter with it. I personally like it and look forward to what I can create with it. I would say that it is a good product worth trying if your getting into making your own personal care products.