Should I Be Worried?

[Caterpillar]

Hello,

Yesterday I made some CP soap (8 oz olive, 4 oz palm, 4 oz safflower, 2 oz sunflower and 2 oz castor oil; 2.55 oz lye, 6.5 oz H2O). I colored part of the batter at trace and tried to do my first in-the-pot swirl. I poured it into my log mold and put it to bed. Everything seemed fine. However, today when I went to clean up all of my soap making tools and containers, etc. the left over soap residue wasn't very hard (this is a different recipe) and, even worse, nothing was rinsing clean away. Everything was very greasy, like I wasn't washing with soap, just oil. When I went to unmold and cut the soap in the loaf mold, it was really soft - like clay or play-doh. I've left it out in the air as a log and will give it another day or two before I cut it. I realize that there isn't a lot of saturated fat in the recipe and I expected it to be a bit softer and require a long cure but because of my washing up experience, I'm now scared that something has gone terribly wrong. The weather was kind of cold yesterday and my lye/water was just above 100 degrees when I mixed it with the oils (I usually mix it in at about 110 degrees). The insulated mold never felt as warm/hot as my previous batches have. I don't see any oil pockets on the exterior of the log so I assume that it really did trace and hasn't separated. But that super greasy clean-up has me concerned.

What do you think? Should I be worried?

 

[danahuff]

It's hard to say. You probably won't know until you cut it, but if the log looked OK, there probably won't be nasty surprises when you cut it. Every time I had soap turn out really wrong, I could tell as soon as I unmolded it with the exception of once when I had a large pocket of oil that ran through the whole log (my soap overheated), and it wasn't possible to see it until I cut it.

I ran your recipe through SoapCalc, and it does look like a softer recipe. Palm oil is the only harder oil. That's probably why it was soft. It might be fine after a longer cure time.

 

[Annamarietang]

It could be also that your percentage of castor oil is a little high. I've only recently been working with castor oil, but I've read numerous times that it will make a really soft soap and the recommended usage rate is 4-6%.
Annie