Avocado Oil For Soap Making

Avocado Oil (Persea gratissimsa)

Using avocado oil for soap making will increase the conditioning properties of your finished product and add creaminess to the soap’s lather. Avocado oil also has wonderful skin care advantages such as a high content of vitamin A, D and E.

Here are some of the characteristics that will be caused by using avocado oil for soap making:

As you can see from the chart above, don’t rely on avocado oil for hardness, cleansing or to produce a bubbly lather. It is better always combine avocado oil with other soap making oils, such as coconut oil or palm oil to reach an appropriate balance for the structure of the finished product. Your soap will be rather soft and have a poor lather if you use this oil alone!

A great thing about avocado oil… and one of the reasons it is such a popular soap making oil is that it has an extremely high percentage of unsaponifiables – molecules that do not take place in saponification. In most cases, this is good for soap making because many of the beneficial components of this ingredient will not combine with the caustic lye to form soap but will remain intact throughout the soap making process and within the final product.

How much avocado oil should you use in your recipe? Well, there’s a pretty large range and as with most things in soap making, no steadfast rule. In fact, there is recipe where avocado oil takes up 45% of the oils used. At first you thought this would be too much, but apparently it turns out great! Obviously, you can also use much smaller amounts and still see its attributes within your soap.