Eleeshea Hagen 
Have you guys ever had an “Aha!” moment? We all have right?
Well, I don’t get them very often, I usually think of my self as a little pack burro. I just take one step at a time with my head down and eventually I get to the top with my huge pack. But last night I was taking a shower and my boyfriend had four different kinds of our soaps in the shower! This might annoy some women but its the prerogative of soap makers hahaha. On a whim I decided to test them out to see what the difference was. Additionally one of the soaps he had in there was an old soap that we have discontinued because it got DOS (which is a very official sounding name soap makers use instead of saying Dreaded Orange Spots) These little spots are confusing little buggers that have a variety of causes everything from deposits in the water (Thus the reason many soap makers use distilled water) to the wrong amount of Super-fat or just the wrong blend of oils. I normally do not get DOS so I was quite surprised when I did in three batches of soap I made winter of 2022. These spots are completely harmless to the user, they are just ugly and when your slogan is “Beautiful Soaps For Beautiful People” you can hardly have soaps with orange polka dots on your shelves. So I did a factory recall and brought them all in.
At the time I went over the formula and tried to figure out what the heck had happened. I decided that I had just left them too long in a humid environment during their cure. I also noticed that I had used an unusually large percentage of soy oil (20%) . I think I ran out of some other oil and needed to make soap so I used what I had, getting in a hurry is my Achilles heel. So I cut back on that, lowered the workshop’s humidity and went back to business as usual. No more DOS.
Skip to last night. I am not one to waste, so my family and friends get to use up all the ugly little buggers. I am using one of these disaster bars and suddenly I am loving it! Like I mean LOVE IT! The bubbles are tight like shaving cream and as profuse as a bubble bath. After the rinse my skin feels like I put lotion on. This ugly bugger is the bomb!
I jump out of the shower and run to my files and pull the formulas I used for all three ugly buggers. Then it hit me plain as day that all these soaps had high soy and high lard. I went and pulled samples of all three and tested them to see how the lather was. It was just as good as the first. And to think I almost quit using lard and soy entirely to simplify my soapmaking process!
So now my plan is to test exactly how close I can get to those percentages without creating DOS. I am super excited to test my theories and thankful to God for making circumstances teach me a valuable lesson.
Let me know in the comments, do you like a soap that leaves your skin feeling like it has lotion on it or is that too much for you?
