soapformulator
EN
Household bars

French formula IV — white soap with cocoa-nut

Open in the calculator

The oils

Oil As the source prints it Share
Olive Oil (virgin / refined / olive oil) Olive-oil · 675 lb 30.0 %
Coconut Oil Cocoa-nut oil · 225 lb 10.0 %
Lard (pure rendered pork fat) Lard · 675 lb 30.0 %
Edible Tallow (beef/mutton dripping) Tallow · 675 lb 30.0 %

How it is made

Process Full-boiled
Alkali Not stated
Superfat Not stated
Water as the source states it
Iodine value 58
INS 143

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 41 29–54
Cleansing 9 below 12–22
Conditioning 54 44–69
Bubbly lather 9 below 14–46
Creamy lather 32 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

The scan prints the cocoa-nut line as "22S" and the total as "2,260"; 225 and 2,250 are the readings that make the column add up and match the other three formulae. Watt: the cocoa-nut oil "gives the soap a disagreeable odour, although it improves its lather".

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.50. 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.

All recipes