Cheap or steep? We make soap using the most expensive and the cheapest oils & compare the difference

We decided to do a little experiment today! When it comes to soap making oils, there is a world of difference between the most expensive and the cheapest soap making oils. We decided to attempt to make a loaf of soap using the most expensive, luxury oils and to also make a loaf of soap using the cheapest oils. We wanted to see if using luxury oils and butters created a bar of soap that was noticeably different on the skin, or if the cheapest of bars would also hold its own and stand up to our high requirements. We discuss our recipe, our oil choices and go through gram per gram costings, and we tell you the overall cost per bar of our cheap & steep bars - there was a HUGE difference in the cost price! Watch as we first make a predominantly lard based soap and scent it with the cheapest Lavender essential oil we could find. We then move on to creating our steep bar. This includes oils and butters that we would never normally include in a soap - Monoi, Rosehip, Murumuru and Illipe to name a few! We also chose to use the most expensive Lavender essential oil that we could find - High Altitude French Lavender which cost a fortune and I fully expected to be a waste of money given that the therapeutic properties would likely not survive saponification. We tried to keep the ratio of hard and soft oils similar in both recipes and also tried to keep a similar percentage of conditioning, cleansing oils etc as we wanted our experiment to be a fair one! During the making process our steep bar of soap decided to misbehave, it traced far too quickly (possibly due to either the Monoi or Rosehip oils) and ended up looking fairly ugly! However, we are judging on performance, not looks! We will be doing a part two video on these soaps, showing them after cure and doing a blind test on them to see which one we prefer. Once we have filmed and uploaded part two, it will be linked to this video so you can view our results! Should you wish to recreate either recipe, they are both posted below: For our Cheap recipe: Sodium Hydroxide 99g Water 148g Lard 325g Coconut oil 145g Rapeseed Oil 217g Castor Oil 36g Lavender Essential Oil (from the Soapery) 21g For our Steep recipe: Sodium Hydroxide 103g Water 155g Monoi De Tahiti Infused Oil 145g Murumuru Butter 72g Kokum Butter 145g Illipe Butter 72g Apricot Kernel Oil 108g Avocado Oil 72g Rosehip Oil 72g Castor Oil 36g High Altitude French Lavender Essential Oil (from the Mystic Moments) 21g If you enjoy our videos and soap making tutorials please do give us a like and subscribe :-) You can also follow us and find our soaps here: www.sussexsoap.co.uk www.facebook.com/sussexhandmadesoap www.instagram.com/sussex_handmade_soap If you do head over to our website, we offer our Youtube friends 20% off purchases if you enter code "youtube20" at checkout :-)