Using the Bramble Berry Lye Calculator

I love creating and customizing my own cold process soap recipes. There is a lot of joy in experimenting and finding just the perfect combination of ingredients that make your skin feel great. Using a lye calculator is a lot easier than figuring out how much lye you need in your soap recipe the 'old way'. Excited? Ready to get started? Yay! If you're a new soaper, please read this important post on handling lye correctly and get the beginner's DVD here.



Step 1: Find the oils you are going to use in your recipe
Step 2: Enter in the ounces of each oil
Step 3: Decide what superfat amount you are going to use on the drop down menu. Our calculator goes from 2% to 10%.*
Step 4: Click 'Calculate' button
Step 5: Presto! The 'Lye amount' & the 'liquids suggested amount' appear for you to use in ounces

* Why does the lye calculator only go down to 2%? Because there are slight variations in saponification values based on which book or expert the information comes from and because each slight variation has a range for a saponification value, to be on the extra safe side, we've given a 2% margin of error and will not allow the recommended lye amount to fall under the 2%.

* Why does the lye calculator only go up to 10%? When you have a superfat amount higher than 10%, there is literally 10+ percent of your soap bar that is now oil. While this makes for a moisturizing bar and a extremely luxurious bathing experience, bars made with more than 10% of superfat develope DOS (Dreaded Orange Spots) more quickly than lower superfat and (generalizing) have a lower lather and bubble size because of the excessive oil in the bar.

This is the 2nd iteration of our Lye Calculator. I hope you enjoy using it. If you have any helpful suggestions for how to improve on it, please let me know. I already have some ideas and am excited to develop them for an even better Bramble Berry experience for you.