August 16th, 2015 made shampoo following the Opus Shampoo Bar recipe I found on greatcakessoapworks.com site. I lacked a few of the ingredients so I used regular olive oil instead of pomace, hempseed oil instead of rice bran oil and mango butter instead of Shea and cocoa butter. Geez, I guess it’s not Opus anymore…
I started out by boiling the beer, on low for about 10 minutes to decrease volume and remove the CO2. I also froze the aloe juice but later melted it because I didn’t want room temperature lye water. The liquid percentage was 50/50.
I also used some of the Rosemary soaked olive oil I had left from a previous batch. It wasn’t much, only an ounce or two but what the heck. Rosemary is supposed to be good for the hair.
2% avocado, 5% castor, 27% coconut, 7% hempseed, 24% lard, 5% mango butter, 29% olive, 1% or actually 0.77% stearic acid.
Since it’s a shampoo bar, I also added 7 grams citric acid per pound of oil to help lower the pH and 4.5 grams of DL panthenol per pound of oil to add nourishment.
Yes, I recycle everything for my soaping; even chicken liver containers! (The chicken livers were for my dog, Panini) So, after adding the dry lye to the frozen beer, I then added the aloe and the temperature increased. Into ice bath it went.
After mixing the oils and lye water together at 127 degrees, it seemed to reach trace, but I wasn’t going to be fooled by false trace. So, I continued to stick blend until pudding stage.
This recipe molded up nicely and the next day I was able to cut. No stickiness and firm enough to handle without denting. The smell is lovely and I can’t wait to use this bar.
snellislesavonnier 