Homemade Foaming Handsoap - Part II

In a previous post, I revealed how astonishingly easy it is for me to be amused. By handsoap. No, I'm not Patrick, SpongeBob's brainless, starfish friend, but I have pursued my attempt at homemade foaming handsoap one step further.

My first recipe is as follows:
palm oil, 150 g
coconut oil, 50 g (both oils melted in a ca. 600 mL glass bottle)
water, icy cold, 240 g
potassium hydroxide, 90% w/w, 42 grams

I mixed the KOH with icy water (very exothermic and the icy water makes this part pretty non-smelly, resulting solution about 100-deg-F). Then I added it to a mixture of palm and coconut oils (melted and cooled to ca. 100-deg-F) and added some more water (ca. 100 mL) and shook the crap out of it. It was initially pretty lumpy and two phases. (I think I'd use an immersion blender next time.) For the next day, I shook this high tech glass mixing jar (old mayo jar, Hellman's) and let it set with the lid loosened (just in case the mixture got exothermic or something) and placed the entire jar inside a deep plastic bowl (just to contain anything unexpected). Within several days of leaving it alone, the resulting solution became homogeneous with a bunch of foam sitting on top.

So far, there's roughly 200 grams of solid soap in this mixture (roughly the amount of fat used). After some reading, foaming hand soap is mostly a result of the dispenser, but, equally important, it needs to be pretty dilute; somewhere between 4-10% solids by weight. If I shoot for a first guess of 5% solids (w/w), this would dictate taking this mixture and diluting it (ideally in deionized water) to a total weight of 4000 grams (roughly a gallon). I'm going to let it sit a while longer. After Easter, I'll dilute it and put it in bottles (I scored 5 of those pump bottles on ebay this morning for about a buck each, including shipping) and will let you know the results.

I'll probably also scent the mixture with lemon verbena essential oil if the soap foams nicely (not going to waste it until I know it works).

Parents of small children, you may be reading about the development of your xmas present.

Where to buy stuff:
1. Oils can be purchased here.
2. KOH can be purchased at the Science Co.
3. Hellman's Mayo can be purchased at Giant Eagle, but you have to eat 600 mL of it or dump it in the drain and use the bottle.

Part I
Part II
Part III

Yahoo! Mail Spam Experiment

I like my Yahoo! email address. It's seen me through at least 4 jobs and 3 residences. The constancy of that address eases my anxiety through periods of uncertainty.

I don't entirely hate spam. I peruse the titles to see what the new trends in spam are because, frankly, spammers are clever people. They get by the guards with silly tricks to fool regular expression-type filters (! for an i, penjis for you know, etc.). Generally interesting workarounds to common filtering tricks.

But, the spam box has become immense lately. Despite setting my preferences to dump it after 7 days, it gets 400+ strong at times. And, I don't want it dumped immediately, about 1/100 real messages find their way in there that I need. So, I tried an expt. and am retrying it.

I'll set my preferences to dump the Bulk (spam) folder every 7 days. I'll peruse the Subject line daily to see if anything in there is actually something I need and simply mark it as "not spam" (when opened) and basically disregard the remainder of the Bulk folder resisting the temptation to "empty" it every day. (The other trick spammers have been using is resetting their dates of delivery. I have messages that have dates of 2008, but apparently Yahoo! knows when it was delivered and uses that date for dumping purposes.)

My hypothesis is: If little in the Bulk folder gets read over time, it will max out in about a week, achieve steady state for a while and then drop to nil. OR, will it keep getting pelted? I'll start the experiment today and monitor the bulk folder by date:

Results:
Day, Bulk Messages
01, 00 (reset, dumped Bulk)
02, 21
03, 55
04, 87
05, 119
06, 150
07, 189
08, 219 (auto-dumping should start soon, no "real" messages crept in yet either)
09, 257
10, 238 (auto-dumping has commenced)
11, 263
12, 289
13, 330
14, 230
15, 259
16, 283
17, 236
18, 264
19, 288
20, 328
21, 239
22, 268
23, 295
24, 214
25, 243
26, 281
27, 318
28, 214
29, 230
30, 261
31, 214
32, 249
33, 287
34, 331
35, 368 (2/17/07)