Question and probably help needed.

[Alek]

Hi, this question has probably been asked a million times but I have no idea what to search to find the answer I need so I thought it would be best to just ask.

I have now made a total of 3 batches of CP soap and all of them have turned out differently with the only difference between the first batch and the next two was I added sweet almond oil.

My question is with my second batch after I have used it with water and it's been sitting it turns to almost a gel on the bottom side and I was wondering if this is normal or is there something I should be changing to fix the problem.
The recipe I used was
Olive oil 40%
Coconut oil 30%
Vegetable oil 25%
Castor oil 5%
Lye 35.2%

Thank you all in advance and I hope you can help

Barbara

 

[amd]

That gel is "normal" soap behavior, it means your soap is sitting in water and not drying out. You can prevent it from doing that by changing how you store your soap in the shower/at the sink. If you are using the shower shelf, you can add a soap lift to keep it out of water on the shelf. I use these in my soap dishes at the sinks too and depending on how often those soaps are getting used (like on the weekends when everyone is home) I do need to still tip the dish to pour off excess water. The other thing you could do is use a hanging shower rack so that no water can build up under the soap. These have the added bonus of keeping the soap out of the water spray.

 

[Alek]

Thanks, I do have it sitting on a rack that is meant to let it air out, I was a bit confused as my first batch doesn't seem to do it.

 

[Meena]

Take what i say with several grains of salt because i never made any soap yet, but my eyes did pop open at the "Vegetable oil" on your list. I would not be surprised if this "junk oil" [sorry, i won't eat the stuff] -- IF you did mean grocery-store veg oil -- is part of the problem, along with what seems to me a pretty high OO%. When you added the SAO, you didn't mention which other oil(s) you reduced.

My other thought is to ask if you aged your #2 and #3 soaps the same length of time as the first batch? Whereas Castilles take about a year to fully cure (iirc) and your recipe is 40% OO, this recipe seems like it would benefit from a pretty lengthy cure.

I'm only chiming in because only one of the experience members have gotten around to your post yet, and the question/issue is interesting to me. I am also curious to use this as a test of whether my soapy knowledge is coalescing properly in my brain.

 

[DeeAnna]

I take it that the recipe in Post 1 is your first recipe? What recipe did you use for Batches 2 and 3?

Here's what I suspect -- Sweet almond oil is a high oleic oil, so if you subbed SAO for the veg oil, then along with the olive oil (another high oleic fat) your recipe is 65% high oleic fats.

Soap made with a large % of high oleic fat likes to make a slippery stringy gel (aka "snot" or slime) when sitting in water. That is a normal thing for high oleic soap to do. The layer of oleic gel that's forming on the wet face of your soap means the soap is not drying out properly between uses. If the soap is young, it's going to make this gel even more easily than when it's well cured. But even well-cured high-oleic soaps will eventually make this gel if they stay too wet.