Coconut Oil (Cocos Nucifera) INCI and CAS for Soap Makers

Coconut oil shows up in more soap recipes than almost any other fat, mostly because it brings big, fluffy lather and rock-hard bars. But the way you list it on an ingredient declaration changes depending on one thing: did it react during saponification, or is it sitting in the bar unreacted.

The INCI name

Plain coconut oil, the kind you'd scoop out of a jar and melt into a soap pot, has the INCI name Cocos Nucifera Oil. That's the standardized name you'd use on an ingredient list for a product where the oil stays as oil, like a body butter, a lip balm, or a lotion.

The CAS number

Coconut oil's CAS registry number is 8001-31-8. This identifies the substance itself in chemical and regulatory databases, separate from the INCI naming convention. You'll see this number requested on safety data sheets and sometimes in ingredient databases when a filing system wants a chemical identifier alongside the standardized name.

Form	INCI name	CAS number	Where it applies
Unreacted coconut oil	Cocos Nucifera Oil	8001-31-8	Lotions, balms, unsaponified oil blends
Saponified coconut oil (soap)	Sodium Cocoate (bar soap) or Potassium Cocoate (liquid soap)	Distinct CAS numbers apply to the saponified salts, not the raw oil's CAS	Cold process and hot process bar soap, liquid soap
Fractionated derivatives	e.g. Caprylic/Capric Triglyceride	Separate CAS numbers per derivative	Lighter oil blends, not true coconut oil itself

Why saponification changes everything

This is the part that trips up new soap makers filing their first notification. When coconut oil reacts with lye, sodium hydroxide for bar soap or potassium hydroxide for liquid soap, it doesn't stay as coconut oil anymore. The fatty acids in the oil combine with the alkali to form a completely different chemical substance, a fatty acid salt. That's genuinely what soap is.

So a cold process bar made with coconut oil doesn't list "Cocos Nucifera Oil" on its ingredient declaration. It lists Sodium Cocoate, the saponified salt, because that's the actual substance present in the finished bar. If you used a blend of oils, olive, coconut, and palm say, your finished soap lists Sodium Olivate, Sodium Cocoate, and Sodium Palmate, each corresponding to its saponified fat, not the original oil names.

Liquid soap follows the same logic but with potassium hydroxide, so you'd see Potassium Cocoate instead.

Superfat and unreacted oil

Most soap recipes are formulated with a superfat, extra oil added beyond what the lye can saponify, left deliberately unreacted to boost moisturizing feel and lather quality. If your recipe includes a 5 percent superfat and part of that superfat is coconut oil, you technically have a small amount of unreacted Cocos Nucifera Oil sitting alongside the Sodium Cocoate in the finished bar. Whether and how granularly that gets broken out on a declaration is a formulation detail worth getting right with whoever is reviewing your specific filing, since it depends on how your recipe accounts for the superfat oil.

A few practical notes for soap makers

• Don't paste "coconut oil" straight onto a cosmetic notification. Regulators want the INCI name, not the everyday trade name, and for true soap that means the saponified form.
• If you're making a syndet bar, a soap-like product formulated with synthetic surfactants instead of true saponification, you're likely not making true soap at all in the regulatory sense, and your listing requirements shift again.
• Remember that "true soap," an alkali salt of fatty acids sold purely on a cleansing claim, can be treated differently than a cosmetic in some markets. The moment you add a cosmetic claim, moisturizing, anti-acne, softening, your bar is treated as a cosmetic regardless of how it was made, and the full ingredient declaration and notification requirements kick in.
• Coconut oil doesn't appear on Canada's Cosmetic Ingredient Hotlist as a prohibited or restricted substance, but always check the current list yourself since Hotlist entries and concentration limits can change.

Getting the INCI and CAS pairing right for something as common as coconut oil sounds like a small detail, but it's exactly the kind of small detail that trips up a notification and slows down a launch. Cosmetic Comply handles this mapping automatically, matching your recipe's ingredients, including supplier blends, to their correct INCI names and CAS numbers, and flags saponified fats correctly so your filing reflects what's actually in the bar rather than what was in the pot before the lye went in.