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Household bars

French formula I — white, odourless soap

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The oils

Oil As the source prints it Share
Olive Oil (virgin / refined / olive oil) Olive-oil · 675 lb 30.0 %
Arachis Oil (Peanut Oil) Earth-nut oil · 675 lb 30.0 %
Lard (pure rendered pork fat) Lard · 900 lb 40.0 %

How it is made

Process Full-boiled
Alkali Not stated
Superfat Not stated
Water as the source states it
Iodine value 77
INS 117

This is a boiled soap. A kettle soap has its excess alkali salted out and drawn off before framing, so the recipe states the alkali charged, never the alkali the bar keeps. Read as a modern cold-process recipe it would be lye-heavy.

What the numbers say

Hardness 25 below 29–54
Cleansing 1 below 12–22
Conditioning 71 above 44–69
Bubbly lather 1 below 14–46
Creamy lather 25 16–48

Computed from the fatty acids of the fats above. The bands are what the craft has settled on, not chemistry — a bar outside one is not wrong.

The source

Watt: "This produces a white, odourless soap."

Alexander Watt, The Art of Soap-Making: A Practical Handbook of the Manufacture of Hard and Soft Soaps, Toilet Soaps, Etc., Crosby Lockwood and Co., London, 1884, p.49. The Art of Soap-Making: A Practical Handbook of the Manufacture of Hard and Soft Soaps, Toilet Soaps, Etc. · read 2026-09-22

Read from the Internet Archive OCR of the Cornell University Library copy. Page numbers are taken from OCR'd running headers and may be one out where the header digits were damaged.

Read from a scan rather than a proofread transcription, so the figures are checked against the book’s own printed total where it prints one.

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