Coconut Lime Soap

We’ve been making quite a bit of soap lately. Since we loved our 100% goats milk soap, we thought we’d substitute coconut milk and see what happens.

Coconut Lime Soap
Coconut Lime Soap

We are really happy how they turned out. It’s still too soon to try them (It’s not been four weeks yet) but they look good but smell a bit strong.

One difference we found with coconut milk  is that the mixture comes to trace real fast. We couldn’t believe how it was already ready to pour into the mold.

If you want to make cold process soap for Christmas, it’s a little late unless you want to tell your recipient to wait for it to cure. We were really pushing to get all of our done so they would be ready before Christmas giving.

Here is the recipe. Please refer to the cold process instructions here.  To make the process go a bit smoother, we measured all of the oils ahead of time.

Coconut Lime Soap [print_link]

Olive Oil (40%) 360 grams

Palm Oil (25%) 225 grams

Coconut Oil (30%) 270 grams

Castor Oil (5%) 45 grams

Coconut milk – 342 grams (half frozen, half cold)

Lye – 129 grams

2 tablespoons of coconut lime fragrance oil added at trace

4 tablespoons castor oil added at trace

This makes 2 lbs of soap or 10 bars. (We use a 4 lb mold.) As with any recipe you get off of the internet, please run this through one of the calculators. This is my favorite calculator.

Regarding the coconut milk, we poured half of the amount into an ice cube tray to freeze it while the other half was put in the refrigerator. When we were ready to soap, we put the cold coconut milk in the lye container and added a little lye. Then the cubes were added and more lye added carefully.

As I mentioned earlier, this was probably the fastest trace we have seen so far. The coconut milk is supposed to add moisturizing properties and extra lather. Sounds wonderful. I’ll let you know how this soap feels soon!

UPDATE: 3/23/2013 – We finally tried this soap this month, over a year from when we made it. We didn’t like the smell and thought maybe the process was flawed. However, when I finally tried this a couple weeks ago, I found it to be a wonderful soap. We decided that we don’t like the Coconut Lime Fragrance Oil. It smelled good in the bottle but terrible on the soap. We also decided to freeze all of the coconut milk into ice cubes. Works much better.