Help, my soap keeps coming out soft!

[Natalie]

The third time is not a charm as I was hoping it would be.

My first try at making soap was hot process kit. I think it siezed or something, it was very lumpy and sort of waxy. Ewwghh.

2nd try I used coconut oil, olive and store brand vegetable shortening, the thick white stuff in the can. I fogot the exact recipe now but I did run it through a lye calcualtor at the time. This was about 3 weeks ago. Left it in the mold 48 hours, took it out and when cutting it noticed it was the consistency close to peanut butter. should it be that soft? It did get harder as time went by, but it's not something I'd show off and say,"Oh, I made soap!"

3rd try was the other day. 8oz Coconut oil, 8oz shortening in the can, 4 oz Avacado oil, 2oz grapeseed, 1oz FO, if I remember correctly 9oz water and 4 oz lye. Soft again, just like the second batch.

Between the 2nd and 3rd try I got a hand mixer which was a big help! It didn't take forever to trace like the first 2 times.

I'm wondering if it's the shortening. I run everything through soapcalc9 and it looked like it would be fine. Since I'm new to this I don't want to make big batches, a pound is plenty. I did cold process for the 2 and 3rd times. Am I making any sense?!

 

[Laurie]

Natalie, I can't help too much. But it does seem like alot of water and lye for 22 oz of oils. Not sure. Someone else will probably chime in.

Laurie

 

[Barb]

3rd try was the other day. 8oz Coconut oil, 8oz shortening in the can, 4 oz Av0cado oil, 2oz grapeseed, 1oz FO, if I remember correctly 9oz water and 4 oz lye. Soft again, just like the second batch.

i ran this thru the lye calc real quick. lye amount at 5% superfat 3.18oz. and water 8.36 oz. which is good for starters. you could have dropped this down to 6 or 7 unless your fragrance oil was finicky.

did you gel this? a gelled soap will be harder out of the mold then one not gelled.

you ended up with
hardness 43
cleansing 24 ( tad to high for me but not my soap )
condition 50 ( while this number is not that high, this soap does contain a high percentage of linoelic fatty acids which contributes to your conditioning. highly conditioning oils are usually found in oils that are softer/or liquid in nature.
bubbly 24
creamy 19
&
ins 160,
which indicates this should be a hard bar.

it could depend on the shortening you used. they are not all created the same. a meat shortening may contain mostly lard and lesser amounts of tallow and about 4 % soybean. while a veggie one can be soybean and cottonseed. depending on where you are located them also vary. i know canada's veggie shortening contains palm where here in the us our's doesn't. having said that. i would give it a couple more weeks to see where it is at.

how dependable is your scale?

a stick blender would not whip as much excess air into your soaps as a hand mixer.

for such a smaller batch i would just hand stir it with a whisk. i hand stir most of my smaller soap batches and they still trace within 5 minutes.

were the soap faires or gremblins hiding out at your house, were the stars and moon in proper alignment. did you stand on one leg while stirring the soap? just kiddin.