The Joy of Learning: The Soap Making Journey

If you asked me in 2018 if I'd be interested in making something as simple, but equally technical as soap, I would laugh. But, learning becomes a wonderful activity if you enjoy it. And personally, this is so with soap making. In the year of 2020, myself and the extended family were thought how to make soap using ingredients in ratio measurements. Meaning, we were taught using cups on the different ingredients. The first batches of soaps made were very effective. In fact, they were too effective to say the least, as it had high cleansing and the skin would suffer from flaking. It couldn’t be used in consecutive bathing/showering, especially for my “fake melanin” skin. The commercial bit of the soap was a success nevertheless, but there were customers that actually had bad skin reactions, and I had to study why this was so.

As I began delving into the knowledge of soap making, understanding the behavior of coconut oil, animal fat (lard & tallow), palm, shea and cocoa butter. It opened a whole new world for me. Given that coconut oil is a readily available ingredient, we concentrated on understanding its properties and behavior when mixed with lye solution. To be frank, soap is just oil mixed with water. However, and realistically, oil cannot mix with water, they need an agent to marry both. That is where sodium hydroxide comes in, and it has to be specifically pure lye (or 99%). All these ingredients have to be precisely weighed, using certain levels of ratios or thresholds (don’t need to delve into that) depending on what type of measurements a soap maker uses.

Now, in order to achieve the right soap that is good for all types of skin, there is something called super fatting. It basically means leaving some oils on the soap or un-saponified oils. For the factory-made bath soaps, the normal oil residue or super fat is 8%. However, many factory-made soaps use combinations of oils, animal fat I mentioned above, and it gives the quality, texture and cleansing and supple features to the soaps.

For us here PNG and Bougainville, coconut oils are quite easy to make, and can be made in large amounts at the cottage level (something we’ll talk about later). Hence, coconut needs to be given a much higher super fatting as it is highly cleansing. Coconut oils contains certain ingredient, that when it saponifies, it can act as a strong cleaning agent. Hence, the safest super fat percentage is 25%, as I have come to accept for my skin type.

However, if you leave too much oils on the soap, it can also cause acne and pimples for skins types that are produce their own body oil. Hence the preferable safe ranges are between 18 to 25%. With our melanin skin, we have higher skin tolerance (this is just my assumption). Hence, our soap making involves precision measurements and combinations to achieve each percentage scale. Note that sodium hydroxide is an imported ingredient, but it only makes 10% of the entire mixture. Hence the rest of the ingredients have to be organic. That is water, coconut oil and the preferred additive.

Even so, ingredient mixture can be calculated in different ways, as oil to lye solution (which is a 2:1 ratio), or water as a percentage to oils (which is a 38% threshold). I can spare the boring details for another time. But from the understanding of these, we were able to come up with soaps which are supple and smooth, but equally cleansing.    

As I mentioned, 90% of the ingredients are organic, and they all come from Ioro, hence the name IorOrganic, staying true to its name and identity as a product from a place of hurt (as the Nasioi name Ioro implies). Ioro hosts the former Panguna Mine, where the islands political struggle began.

Samples below are organic turmeric soaps with a super fat of 20%.





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