Customer Reviews

The Soapmaker's Companion: A Comprehensive Guide with Recipes, Techniques & Know-How (Natural Body Series - The Natural Way to Enhance Your Life)

5 star:		(43)
4 star:		(20)
3 star:		(12)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is one of my favorite books I've found on the wonderful, newly found hobby of mine - Soapmaking!

The author does a brilliant job of combining the must-have step-by-step detailed instructions on soapmaking basics for beginners, with the best list and descriptions of all soapmaking ingredients!

Beginners and experts alike will enjoy the many tried and true recipes, even specialty soaps! It also covers the "Chemistry of soapmaking", including tables for making your own recipes! She even has a section on starting up your own business to sell your handmade soap creations! And it is all put together in an easy to understand and follow format, for us beginners, or "dummys" in soapmaking!

The only reason that I rated this book at "4 stars", instead of "5 stars" is because it does not include any pictures (and I LOVE pictures!)- only the hand-drawn illustrations in green ink, as is the print, featured throughout the book. She does use alot of fragrances & different oils in her soap recipes, but includes a list of buying resources in the back.

This, along with my other favorite book on soapmaking, "The Complete Soapmaker", by Norma Coney, (full of beautiful pictures!)which features mostly "hand-milled" or rebatched soaps, are the ones I find myself going to time and time again for reference and inspiration!

If you are a beginning soapmaker, there is no other book you should buy. Other books have helpful information; this book, however, compiles all the information you need into one helpful guide. It has frequently asked questions, lists properties of oils, discusses colorants and scents, and explains the chemical process that occurs. If you have never made soap before, it is an incredibly useful guide.

I have read some of the criticisms in the other reviews, and I must disagree with some of them. I did not find most of her recipes to be unduly expensive to make; those that are can easily be avoided by the soapmaker on a budget. Furthermore, I rarely use the recipe section of the book; I use her formulas and the other information she provides to construct my own recipes instead. Also, I disagree that a 10% fat discount (which she typically recommends) is way too much. Some people choose to use a lesser fat discount, and that is fine; for the beginning soapmaker, I think it might be better to provide more of a margin of safety. Once you are more experienced, you can experiment with lowering the fat discount if that's what you prefer.

Really, a beginning soapmaker cannot do better than this book. It compiles all the information you need. Once you are more experienced, you will do well to explore other sources of information (there are some good resources on the Internet, and some other decent soapmaking books as well), but if you are a beginner, Cavitch is definitely the place to start.

It really is too bad that the author published her first book before anyone else could publish something with more accurate and flexible information, because she is now regarded as an expert in the soapmaking realm. Some basic problems with Cavitch are logistical and procedural. No one has to weigh water, no one needs to use some of the ingredients she calls for in every single recipe, such as grapefruit seed extract. Her recipes call for GSE because her overly superfatted soaps will go rancid without addition of this preservative. Why does she superfat so greatly? Some speculate she had a lousy scale and poor math skills in terms of calculating amounts of lye and accurate fat measurements back when she was learning this craft, and never bothered to perfect her science nor correct the recipe problems (and if you can get it in print and people buy it, well, you must be doing something right), it certainly is a logical reason for the way she does things. Cavitch is a good example of a good resource with serious limitations, she's done her homework on vegetable-based oils/fats and you get all kinds of great info on these, but it's clear she never researched thoroughly enough to make statements on things like the use of animal fats, using a stick blender rather than spoon for stirring to trace, etc. Soaping isn't rocket science, but it isn't a very strict methodology either, and there are far better resources on the web and mailing lists therein, where one can learn much more than this book promises, with a multitude of perspectives and approaches. Please don't buy into the hype and buy this book.

An excellent reference manual that's good for years of use. It's the only consumer-level soapmaking book I've seen that was written with the assistance of a professional chemist. None of the usual folk wisdom and clumsy techniques. Cavitch discusses the physical reasons for batch failures and provides solutions using personally tested formulas. Information on balancing saturated and non-saturated vegetable fats is especially good. Basic information for starting a small business is also included. However, the 40-bar recipes are way too large for average home users and measurements are based on the metric system. Reducing high yields to reasonable levels and converting measurements to the U.S. system will cause the failures you're trying to avoid. Also, many of the raw materials suppliers listed are industrial wholesalers who don't sell to consumers. Given the amount of use this book will receive, it should have been published in a hardcover edition, on much better paper and loaded with color photographs. Well worth the additional cost.

This is a great book for beginners, with a lot of neat tips and tricks and some fabulous recipes.

The lack of photos are a definite drawback, but the book does have illustrations, for what it's worth. The author also has some definite bias against certain methods (she doesn't like rebatching, and she doesn't encourage readers to use a freezer to unmold soaps), and it's good to keep an open mind when you read this. But then, Ms. (Mrs.?) Cavitch herself would probably encourage you to try things for yourself rather than just taking her word for it; you get that sense of personality from her writing.

I have found that the batches in this book are VERY big, and I have cut them down myself and found them to take a LOOOOONG time to trace (upwards to an hour or more). I'm not sure if this is just my lack of experience or her recipes; since I use an electric mixer it's not that much of a problem to me, but it would be to someone mixing their soap by hand.

This is an excellent book for beginners who want to learn how to make vegetable-based soaps. I will say, however, that you should be mindful that her recipes are probably more expensive than other books prescribe; after buying the specialized oils (coconut, palm, olive) and essential oils, plus the electric mixer, you will definitely have spent a lot of money. But if making non-animal-fat based soaps is worth it to you, by all means -- buy this book.

Many of the recipes Cavitch gives call for a lot of hard to find and expensive oils, which can discourage new soapmakers.

She also superfats too much, and I also think that can misinform newbies.

Her descriptions of oils and their properties are really helpful, but she doesn't describe using a stick blender at all (only a regular blender).

Good for reference, but definitely should not be used as a soap making bible. I found Kathy Miller's site much more helpful, more informative, and much more realistic for today's soapmaker.

This book is the staple of so many soapmakers. It covers many aspects of soapmaking. I particularly like the trouble shooting guide, in case I come up with something that looks unfamiliar. I just look it up and find out what I should do with the soap.

I like her recipes too. Her Hempsters Delight is a favorite of my customers.

One point though. As a seasoned soapmaker, you must do your own lye calculations. There are several good lye calculators on the web. There's always a chance for a misprint in a book or anothers recipe. Just type "lye calulator" into a search engine.

This book is the standard Bible to most soapmakers. I refer to my copy often.

I bought this book years ago, when I first started making soap. It has a wealth of good reference information on different oils, colorants, additives, etc., information that I still refer to occasionally. Unfortunately it's usefulness as a guide is somewhat limited by several things:

1) She is biased against the use of any ingredients of animal origin, especially animal fats. No coverage of the use of animal fats in soap is given at all, and her only excuse is lame, not backed up by any actual science, and demonstrably untrue.

2) Her recipes are too large, are overly complicated, and way too superfatted. Plus she recommends the use of GSE, an ingredient whose use as a preservative has been thoroughly discredited.

3) Some of her warnings/cautions are odd, to say the least. Her paranoia of clay, for one, is downright bizarre. Her admonition against pouring raw soap down the drain, in the event of a ruined batch, is utterly nonsensical.

4) The chapter on the chemistry of soap making is too much. She tries to go so in-depth that she's obviously in over her head, to the point that I was embarassed for her when I read it. The information here that would be useful/interesting to soap makers could have been condensed to a couple of pages.

5) She only covers cold process, and then, only cold process where the ingredients are combined at higher temperatures. There's no excuse for only covering the cold process in a "comprehensive" guide, but the fact that she only gives one basic cold process method may be an artifact of the next problem...

6) This book is dated. I started making soap around 2000, and even then people were using stick (aka immersion) blenders to mix their soap. There's no mention of stick blenders at all in this book, and that's a HUGE ommission. There's also no mention of alternative cold process techniques that are very mainstream today; e.g. discount water cold process, and room temperature cold process.

The bottom line is that there are a number of other books on the market that contain much more up-to-date soap making information than this one, not to mention all of the resources available on the internet. This book is still worth checking out, but don't expect it to be what it claims to be.

This book is interesting, but it was low on recipes and high on information overload. If you and some soapmaking friends want to go in together on this book to share among you it would probably be worth it as an additional resource. She does have a good discussion of why you should label soaps when you make cosmetic-type claims, and whether it's worth it to be in business. But--I can't see too many hobbyists trying out her ideas, because most of them would land you in the poorhouse pretty quickly, even if you're bulk-buying with friends. There are cheaper recipes in other books and on the internet. Also, I'm somewhat leery of claims concerning most of the expensive oils. I mean, we're talking about something (soap) that is washed down the drain, not worn like creams or perfumes. I'd rather save the expensive stuff for other cosmetics, so as to really get my money's worth. The last complaint I have is that almost all of the measurements are in grams, and while it is probably more accurate, it is not practical for many of us to own two scales, which she recommends. I will say that if you have to choose between this and her other book, choose this one, as the recipes are much more manageable for the home soapmaker, size-wise, than in the first book.

The information and techniques of cold process soap making are clearly and thoroughly covered in this book. This is definitely a good book to learn the process of soapmaking. The lack of pictures, makes the book slightly less enjoyable. Several recipes include expensive oils or butters that most soapmakers may not be able to find locally, which in my opinion don't belong in a beginners soap making book. It is however a great book, maybe not for beginner's recipes, but the information is well worth reading this book.