Soap suddenly shrinking after a year

[cascarral]

Hello!

This is a soap I made a year ago, it’s a coconut milk soap, has some caolin clay and colored with anatto infusion.

I sold this soaps to a store a couple of months ago and they were perfectly fine, they had been curing for over 9 months when I sent them.

Now they have developed this white powdery film that looks like soda ash but, wouldn't soda ash appear during the first weeks?

There's also shrunk significantly, oddly enough the layers separated by the pencil line shrunk differently.

I can't imagine what could have made them age so quickly in just a couple of months. Also, the other bars (charcoal and pink clay) are OK, it's just these anatto ones. The pink clay has coconut milk as well and have never seen them age like this.

Second picture is how they used to look

 

[dibbles]

How were they stored at your home and how were they displayed in the store? Were they wrapped at one place and not the other? It could be a change in environmental conditions.

 

[Dawni]

I don't know about CP.... But in my earlier soaps (almost all HP), different sections shrunk differently depending on if I added more liquid to that part, in the form of additives maybe, or not. I'll have to look for my notes to tell you which shrunk more and which were less...

 

[DeeAnna]

That happens to CP soap too, @Dawni.

Some of the soaps including mine in the high-water, low-water challenge awhile back had some ripples or other signs that showed some parts were shrinking more than others.

 

[cascarral]

How were they stored at your home and how were they displayed in the store? Were they wrapped at one place and not the other? It could be a change in environmental conditions.

This was just before covid, the store closed a couple of weeks after I left them there, probably they moved them around carelessly