camwyn | (no subject)

Gonna go to Cambridge Naturals tonight and pick up some beeswax and essential oils, as I already have the coconut, olive, etc. The honey and beeswax soap recipe will use palm oil instead of soy shortening and possibly clove or cinnamon instead of cedar. Can't find a place I can walk into that sells soy shortening, although I haven't tried calling restaurant supply places yet- I can order the stuff online, though. (Spectrum's palm shortening runs around 48 cents an ounce; soy shortening is 11 cents an ounce. Palm provides more conditioning and a harder bar. We'll see how well it works in conjunction with beeswax, which also makes for hard soap. If the result is too hard or seizes up when I mix the oils with the lye and water, I'll switch to the soy next time. As for the essential oil, cedar apparently doesn't mesh quite as well with orange as other things; cinnamon and clove both come with good recommendations and seem to be popular for other purposes anyway.

I have two or three samples of the shampoo bar recipe (sans egg yolk- I forgot to put it in) that I can probably send out as is. I forget how many I kept from the batch. I'm not buying the stuff for that until I see what I have at home. Either way I'm probably going to buy the ingredients for it online, since castor and jojoba oil can be had for a good deal less if I buy them from Jedwards (no, no relation to Jedward) than if I buy the bottles commonly to be had in places like CVS. Granted, that involves buying them a gallon at a time, but there are worse fates.

Oh- I also have a good many samples of my first shampoo bar available. That one has no spices in it and was scented with cedarwood, pine, and basil; the end result is oddly anise-smelling but still not bad. I can send that to people who want to give it a try instead. That one's got egg yolk in, for the lecithin and so on.