| Yesterday I talked a little about Castor Oil. As I haven’t yet featured Castor Oil as a single oil soap, I thought we could fix that today. Are you ready to learn what castor oil contributes to you soap? Let’s head to the kitchen and find out!I had a little whoops when making the Single Castor Oil soap. I heated the castor oil in the microwave for two minutes. I stirred my lye into my water and without letting either cool, I mixed them together. A separate test told me my castor oil would have been about 200° F and my lye solution about 170° F. I had a volcano in my mixing beaker! I was to busy jump back to get any decent photos of the action but it sure made a mess!What was really amazing to me is that the soap was so hot it started to gel on the counter! I have never seen a soap do that. I certainly relearned the importance of checking your temperatures! I also learned that 5 minutes of letting things cool is much better than 15 minutes of cleaning up hot soap! Egads! I think I forgot my brain today!
Needed Materials
Recipe
Weigh the Castor Oil into a microwave safe container. Heat until warm. This took about 2 minutes for me. Add the lye to the water to for a lye solution. Mix the oils and lye solution and blend until trace is achieved. Step back watch volcano. Scrape into a mold and allow to sit for 24 hours. Enjoy!
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 Soap Scraped into Mold  Weighed Oil  Adding Lye Solution  Mixing Oil and Lye Solution  Mixing Soap  Watching Volcano  Scraping Soap off of counter |
Cool! Love that volcano, but glad its not me cleaning up. lol. I tripped over my own feet once and tossed my newly made lotion all over the clean kitchen. I wonder how the soap feels when its finished. Please let us know. Are you going to remake this with the correct temputures?
Fun volcano! You’ve invented a new method – kitchen counter rebatch! 🙂
BTW, you don’t have to heat oils that stay liquid at room temperature. Let your lye cool down to 100-120 and you’re good to go.
So I am curious, what were the properties of the finished castor oil soap?
Karen,
The finished soap had a creamy and smooth feel but there was not any lather. I hope this helps!
I am curious what your soap was like after curing? The properties of castor oil in a soap should have resulted in a soft bar with very high conditioning, bubbles and lather but low cleansing. Does it describe your end result after 4-6 weeks?
Not much later at all. It was a softer bar and felt more gummy and not really pleasant. It cleaned well enough but the texture of the soap was just not thrilling. It also contributed to a LOT of soap scum. Need to clean the shower? YEP!
Do you have hard water by chance? That may have killed the bubbles and contributed to soap scum, along with the bar being really soft (so lots of it would come off the bar when you used it). I’m going to make a liquid soap with 100% castor oil.
Margaret,
We have a water softener because our area has hard water. My shower and tub get a deep cleaning after many weeks. No buildup of soap or hard water unless castor oil soaps are used. Then it just feels gunky.
I don’t often use a cleaner for my shower (I use soap there daily, right?) and when I deep clean I use a steam machine without any additional products.
I think castor oil is like liver, you love it or hate it but it has no fence sitters.
Tina