I admit it: I don't like coffee. My parents were very British, and we were a family of tea drinkers, so I didn't get much exposure to coffee until my first day of university when I was surrounded by at least 300 people all sipping their morning brew, the smell of which was completely overwhelming.

But I'm starting to fall in love with this ingredient...

When I was at Windy Point Soap in Calgary last week, I had a chance to play more with this ingredient - INCI: Hydrogenated soy oil (and) Coffee arabica seed oil (and) Tocopherol - and I'm really enjoying working with it! Out of the jar it has a very rich coffee fragrance thanks to the coffee seed oil. It feels slightly silky and almost dry when used neat on the skin, and it's a great addition to a lotion or body butter thanks to this quality.
This isn't a butter in the sense that cocoa butter or mango butter would be - it's a butter created by hydrogenating soy bean oil to make it thicker. When an oil is hydrogenated, it's saturated, meaning there are no double bonds, only single ones. Single bonded fatty acids lay down flat, so they can pack more closely together, and they can create a thicker product like butter. (This is why we see hydrogenated vegetable oils in things like margarine.)

So the fatty acids we see most in soy bean oil - oleic acid, with one double bond and linoleic acid, with two double bonds - are hydrogenated by adding an oxygen, making them straighter, like stearic acid, so they become thicker and hav...