Suddenly Soggy Foot Soak--A tale of woe

Soapmaking Forum

Help Support Soapmaking Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

SomethingGoodAustin

Well-Known Member
Joined
Apr 16, 2012
Messages
94
Reaction score
23
The weirdest thing happened the other day and I'm hoping someone here can help me figure it out... I was making bath salts and foot soaks to sell in gift sets at a craft fair. I started by making a masterbatch of bath salts using an approximately 3-3-3 mixture of epsom salt, Dead Sea salt, and sea salt and a small amount of jojoba oil. I took a third of this mix (about 24 oz) and added a cup of baking soda. This _was_ going to be a base for a foot soak fizzy. I set it aside to work on something else and covered it with plastic wrap in the meantime.

A night or so later, I uncovered the mix to start working with it. Right away, I noticed it was clumpy and somewhat damp, even though the humidity hadn't been that high, maybe about 50% (I'm in Texas). I started to work it with my (dry) hands to break up clumps, and it seemed to actually get more moist. Very very strange. I added about a teaspoon and a half of neem oil, stirred it with a fork, divided the mix in half, and then scented each half with essential oils. I added NO other liquid, but as I continued to work it, it became almost a sticky paste--not wet, mind you--just damp, about as damp as you'd want a bath bomb to be. Perhaps foolishly, I added my citric acid and started stirring. Fizz, fizz, fizz. I frantically started tossing in additional salt, Kaolin clay, oat powder--anything to redistribute the moisture.

Anyone remember the Sorcerer's Apprentice? It was totally like that. Wetter and fizzier, no matter what. And oily. I tried to squeeze the mix into molds, but even though it was wet enough to fizz, it wasn't wet enough to hold together. I finally gave up and covered the bowls with paper towels so I wouldn't have to look at the sad mess.

Now I have two dishes full of congealed (but really good-smelling) stuff that is as hard as a rock, still slightly sticky, doesn't fizz, and seems immovable--it'll take a chisel to get it out of these bowls.

So..... Anyone wanna try and troubleshoot this mess? Thoughts on what might have happened? Has this happened to anyone here before--salts becoming suddenly soggy without actual water being added?
 
No help yet? BUMP!

Adding the citric acid after your mix got to a wet paste maybe wasn't such a good idea.. :) That makes sense to me.
But I don't know about the jojoba oil. I've never tried that before. Maybe that, and not drying the mix, was the problem?

Anyone else has any ideas?
 
no chemistry background here or anything, so maybe someone else can back me up/correct me,
but could it be the minerals of the different salts reacting to one another?

I had something similar happem to me when I made some bath salts with epsom salts and magnesium chloride flakes. The minute the MgCl flakes came into contact with the epsom salt it started to get damp.
 
It's the dead sea salts. The mineral make up is drawing moisture from the air. I'd keep them to a minimum of you want to keep using them. Like 10% of less.

And I wouldn't put them in anything but bath salts. Nothing that would fizz or has dry ingredients because it can completely ruin them.
 
I'd given up on this post, so thanks for the bump!

I've used a variety of oils in bath bombs and fizzies over the years with no real issues. Given that I had made a successful batch of foot fizzies a few months prior with a similar formula but with sea salt in place of DSS, I arrived at the same conclusion as hmlove1213--DSS is the problem. I don't know exactly why it happened the way it did, but I like to keep things simple and low-stress whenever possible. So no more fizzies with DSS for me. :)
 
Back
Top