Sweet Almond Oil for Soap Making

Although somewhat expensive, using sweet almond oil for soap making will add a nice creamy lather and conditioning properties to your soap.

Here are the approximate fatty acid, iodine and SAP values for sweet almond oil:

When using sweet almond oil for soap making, here are the characteristics that you will see within your product:

Many soap makers report a nice richness and somewhat silky feel to their soap's lather produced by sweet almond oil. This ingredient is also very mild and conditioning, making it great for sensitive skin. Sweet almond oil will produce an initially soft soap, but will harden up nicely over time. Another great benefit of sweet almond oil is the label appeal that it offers. Many consumers like to see this luxurious ingredient within their skin care products.

Unfortunately, sweet almond oil is extremely expensive making it impractical to use for soap making in large amounts. Just keep in mind that with this ingredient, a little goes a long way. Even if you only allow it to take up 10% of the oils used, you will still see some positive attributes added to your soap.

Sweet almond oil is also a great soap to superfat with. If you want to incorporate this oil into your soap, but don't want to spend a fortune using it as one of your main soap making oils, you can simply add about 1 tablespoon per pound of oils at the very end of the recipe after saponification has already occurred. I like to do this at a light trace. When using this method, most of the sweet almond oil will remain unsaponified, and you will experienced the benefit of this oil in an unadulterated form.

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