After unmolding my cp soap two weeks ago, it is still very soft, almost like putty. Will the bars ever harden up? What caused this? I let the temp on the water/lye and oils cool to about 90 before mixing and don't know if this caused the softness.
My cp soap is too soft
- Thread starter marie743
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Obsidian
Well-Known Member
I've had batches take a month+ to get hard. Its usually due to not enough hard oils or using too much water. I have a batch that is nearly two weeks old and its still quite soft from too much water.
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What was the actual recipe, though? Water amount and so on.
JustBeachy
Well-Known Member
I agree with Obi. With 50% hard oils, I'd lean towards saying your water was a little too high. It'll just take a while longer to cure.
JustBeachy
Well-Known Member
When they say hard oils, it has more to do with the amounts of the oils , not necessarily just that you split them up. You have a real high percent of softer oils, water looks pretty good. Just gonna take a longer time to harden up.
Might want to look at some more hard oil, coconut , palm kernal. etc
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Hi Marie, your hard oils (palm, CB, & lard) only add to 9% of your total oils, so that by itself will produce a softer bar. You do have a little bit of a water reduction (~34% of oils), which does serve to harden the bars relative to bars with full water (38% of oils), so that was a good. But the low amount of soft oils and only a slight water reduction will still produce a pretty soft bar. Soapcalc.net rates your recipe at a hardness of 21 or 22 (depending on whether you used high oleic sunflower or not), whereas it recommends values between 29 and 54. It'll dry eventually, so just be patient.
In the meantime, try increasing your hard oils so that they total closer to half of your recipe. To get there, you can use almost as much lard and palm as you want, but don't go over about 10% on the CB to prevent killing the lather too much. Or, if you like your recipe in other aspects beyond the softness, you can decrease the amount of water/water substitutes that you use. I like using only twice as much water as I do lye if I am not working with colorants. To do this, choose the "water:lye" option in your lye calc, and plug in the value "2:1".
ETA: Soapcalc won't show the effect of your water reduction in the "Hardness" rating, but it will reflect in the actual hardness of the bars.
In the meantime, try increasing your hard oils so that they total closer to half of your recipe. To get there, you can use almost as much lard and palm as you want, but don't go over about 10% on the CB to prevent killing the lather too much. Or, if you like your recipe in other aspects beyond the softness, you can decrease the amount of water/water substitutes that you use. I like using only twice as much water as I do lye if I am not working with colorants. To do this, choose the "water:lye" option in your lye calc, and plug in the value "2:1".
ETA: Soapcalc won't show the effect of your water reduction in the "Hardness" rating, but it will reflect in the actual hardness of the bars.
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What do you mean "don't go over 10% of the cp"? You said use as much lard and palm as I want. Is SoapCalc a better lye calculator than the one on brambleberry? Thanks for all your help.
alaskazimm
Well-Known Member
She means don't go over 10% coca butter in your recipe.
I don't think one lye calc is really better than another, it's just SoapCalc is probably the most popular here 'bouts. A note on lye calculators - they will all return different results to a small degree. this is because sap values for any given oil is an average, but they should all be safe to use.
They should give similar results, but the user experience varies. Personally I prefer soap calc.
While you can use any % of palm or lard, butters can reduce lather and so should be kept lower, such as 10% cocoa butter or it can cause issues.
You can use the default in the lye calcs which should give you enough time for colouring.
It shouldn't make too much of a difference as long as you start to get the recipe sorted
It shouldn't make too much of a difference as long as you start to get the recipe sorted
