How to Convert Your Recipe from Weights to Percentages

When making soap, measuring the weights of all your ingredients is very important to ensure that the process goes well and you can use your soap safely.

Sometimes however, you have a great recipe, and you’d like to create a bigger batch than your standard sized batch. To save you time, instead of having to repeat the same process over and over just to make more soap.

To do this, many soap makers create their recipes in percentages, and this helps them scale their recipe up or down, depending on how much they want to make.  This can also help you adjust a recipe to fit new molds of different sizes.  Using percentages can also give you a better idea of the qualities in your soap depending on the percentage of each ingredient.

Let’s take an example of how to turn a recipe from measurements in to percentages.

We’ll take a simple recipe like this one (this recipe yields about 3 pounds of soap):

24 ounces olive oil

8 ounces coconut oil

2 ounces castor oil

First start buy adding the weights of all the oils: 24+8+2 = 34 ounces

Now to measure the percentage of each oil in the recipe we divide the weight of each oil by the total:

24 divided by 34 = 0.705

8 divided by 34 = 0.235

2 divided by 34 = 0.059

Now we multiply each answer by 100 to get the percentage of each in the recipe:

0.705 x 100 = approximately %70

0.235 x 100 = approximately %24

0.059 x 100 = approximately %6

To make sure all our math is correct, when we add all the percentages we should get %100

70 + 24 +6 = 100

Now we can rewrite the recipe as percentages

%70 Olive Oil

%24 Coconut oil

%6 Castor oil

Now if we wanted to make a 8 pound  batch of soap:

8 pounds equals 8 x 16 = 128 ounces ( because each pound of soap equals 16 ounces)

Now to see what our new recipe will look like:

Olive oil = %70 x 128 = 89.6 ounces

Coconut oil = %24 x 128 = 30.7ounces

Castor oil = %6 x 128 = 7.7 ounces

Our new recipe to make 8 pounds of soap is

89.6 ounces Olive Oil

30.7 ounces Coconut oil

7.7 ounces Castor oil

To make sure our math is correct we need to add up those measurements and the Total should be 128 oz.

89.6 + 30.7 + 7.7 = 128 ounces. Our math was correct.

Don’t worry about having to do all this math if it seemed difficult.  Most lye calculators will give you your recipe in measurements and percentages.  Remember, this is just the weight of the oils, you will still need to plug in this recipe into a lye calculator to get how much lye and water you need.