lavendermenace
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This is my first time on this forum - so excited to be a part of this community! I'm making cold-process soap with charcoal. Batch after batch is coming out of the molds with a thin white coating on the bars.
It's definitely not lye or ashing - the texture is smooth and fatty, not at all powdery/dusty (like soda ash) or brittle/crumbly (like lye). I'm pretty sure it's just fats, honestly - when I did the zap test for lye, it didn't even "taste" like soap. Ninety percent of the time it appears as a sort of cloudy milky coloring (like the middle bars in the shots below), but sometimes the edges of the white coloring are more defined (like the blotchy bars on the left and right in the shots below).
The white coating is several millimeters thick - it does scrape off (see the last picture below), and the rest of the soap is fine (fully blended, no patches/separation/lye, not too soft or hard). It's the lovely solid black soap I've been dreaming of, hiding tantalizingly just below the surface. I'm making this soap in pretty large bulk, so I'd love to not have to go through the laborious scraping process every time. The frustrating thing is - an acquaintance showed me exactly how she made this exact recipe, and her bars turned out perfectly - solid black right of the molds. Now we've fallen out of touch and I can't for the life of me figure out how to fix this.
Here's the recipe I'm using:
15.2oz beeswax
136.1oz coconut oil (76 deg)
120.2oz olive oil (not pomace)
45.7oz palm kernel flakes
104.64oz water
45.3oz lye
The freshly poured soap goes into an insulated box for 24 hours, then into the freezer for 5-10 hours so that the bars slip out of their plastic molds.This recipe is about 9% superfatted, which is high, but I tried a batch at 6% that turned out with the same white layer. I've also played around with pouring temps, blending speed, time insulated, double-checked my scale, reweighed my ingredients... Nothing seems to help, and I haven't seen or heard of this problem on the soapy corners of the internet, either, which is strange.
ANY insight you lovely people can provide would be so, so appreciated!
It's definitely not lye or ashing - the texture is smooth and fatty, not at all powdery/dusty (like soda ash) or brittle/crumbly (like lye). I'm pretty sure it's just fats, honestly - when I did the zap test for lye, it didn't even "taste" like soap. Ninety percent of the time it appears as a sort of cloudy milky coloring (like the middle bars in the shots below), but sometimes the edges of the white coloring are more defined (like the blotchy bars on the left and right in the shots below).
The white coating is several millimeters thick - it does scrape off (see the last picture below), and the rest of the soap is fine (fully blended, no patches/separation/lye, not too soft or hard). It's the lovely solid black soap I've been dreaming of, hiding tantalizingly just below the surface. I'm making this soap in pretty large bulk, so I'd love to not have to go through the laborious scraping process every time. The frustrating thing is - an acquaintance showed me exactly how she made this exact recipe, and her bars turned out perfectly - solid black right of the molds. Now we've fallen out of touch and I can't for the life of me figure out how to fix this.
Here's the recipe I'm using:
15.2oz beeswax
136.1oz coconut oil (76 deg)
120.2oz olive oil (not pomace)
45.7oz palm kernel flakes
104.64oz water
45.3oz lye
The freshly poured soap goes into an insulated box for 24 hours, then into the freezer for 5-10 hours so that the bars slip out of their plastic molds.This recipe is about 9% superfatted, which is high, but I tried a batch at 6% that turned out with the same white layer. I've also played around with pouring temps, blending speed, time insulated, double-checked my scale, reweighed my ingredients... Nothing seems to help, and I haven't seen or heard of this problem on the soapy corners of the internet, either, which is strange.
ANY insight you lovely people can provide would be so, so appreciated!
