# Is there such a thing as a hard moisturizing bar?



## narnia (May 12, 2015)

I have tried my hand at goat milk soap making lately. Although the bars are nicely moisturizing, I have found them to be quite soft.

I would love to find a recipe that gives a hard, long-lasting bar that is moisturizing/nourishing. Is there such a thing?

BTW...I would prefer not to use lard.


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## hsmomof4 (Oct 31, 2008)

How long after you made the soap did you use it? It's safe to use pretty much right away, but will be harder after 6-8 weeks, so if you didn't wait, that will help. What recipe did you use? That will make a lot of difference, too. As for added hardness, tallow and lard are good, of course, but also palm oil (not the same as palm kernel oil, though there is controversy about both of those as regards sustainable harvesting and environmental issues, including the destruction of orangutan habitat). The nice thing about tallow and lard is that they are byproducts that might otherwise go to waste and can be obtained locally if you look. For example, you could find someone who raises grass fed beef, small scale and local, and buy tallow from them. You'd have to render it yourself, but that's not hard, and then you have something that is considerably better, environmental impact-wise, than ANY oil you might buy that is produced elsewhere (which is almost everything). It actually can be a plus in the marketing department unless you're selling to vegans. But they're not going to buy goat milk soap anyway. 

You can go here http://soapcalc.net/calc/SoapCalcWP.asp and plug in oils to see what values they bring to the finished soap and play with them until you get a combination that you like. Selecting one oil from the list will show you the characteristics of that individual oil in the finished soap in box 5 to the left of the box with all the oils in it. Then you click the + button and it adds it to your recipe. Choose another oil and do the same (clicking the + button for each successive oil...ie, click the + button next to number 1 for the first oil, the + button next to number 2 for the second oil, and so on). Then click the "calculate recipe" button and it will give you the values of the bar as a whole for hardness, cleansing, condition, bubbly, etc.


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