Olive oil soap is also sometimes called Castile Soap. Many soap makers add additional vegetable oils to their olive oil soaps to speed trace and increase the lather of the finished soap. A true 100% olive oil soap is extremely gentle but has a creamy, many times slimy lather. Usually coconut or palm oil is added to the olive oil to help give it some bubbles and bring it to trace. It can take hours and even days to get a 100% olive oil soap to trace.

Whether soap is 100% olive oil or 10% olive oil there is absolutely no doubt that the addition of olive oil into a soap recipe is beneficial. It is the one most important oil when it comes to soap making. Recently the price of olive oil has shot up so many soap makers are switching their suppliers to alternate oils. I have experimented with substituting higher percentages of other oils to make up for reducing the amount of olive oil in a recipe but the bar just doesn’t perform like my high olive oil content bars. Those batches usually go into my ‘hand mill rack’ and I hand mill them along with higher content olive oil soap.

Posted by Shelley in Soap Making on May 9th, 2007 |