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If your lye is clumpy, that means moisture is getting into your lye container. Which means air is getting in also. Contact with moisture and carbon dioxide in the air will cause your lye to become soda ash, which does not cause oil to saponify. Basically, your lye is less pure than your lye...

If you add fat to your batter, that is the same thing as including it as an oil. It will saponify with the rest and the extra oil will increase your superfat if you don't account for it in your lye calculator. If you add a small enough amount to not have to worry about that too much, you might...

At first I thought this was referencing @ResolvableOwl's universally hated soap, and I was thinking "What is WRONG with you?!"

That only works for the no-stir kind, though. Regular palm oil has to be melted and mixed every time it's used due to the heavier components sinking to the bottom as it cools. If you used that trick with regular palm oil, your fatty acid profile would be a little different each time you used it.

This hasn't been my experience. If a fan was actually drying the air by itself, where would the water end up? It has to go somewhere. I live in an extremely humid area, and running multiple fans all over the house doesn't bring down the humidity at all. It stays around 70% at 78°F in the summer...

Is it no-stir palm, or the regular stuff? If it's regular, I'd advise you put it in hot water to melt it, mix it completely, and then pour it out to measure it. You will have to melt and mix it each time you measure some out, unless you go ahead and measure out portions for future batches into...

I was going to give you a link to the one I got on Amazon, but it's not available anymore. There are a lot of other scales on Amazon, look for one that measures in .01g increments. Mine is USB powered, and it has a setting where it never automatically powers off after inactivity. That's an...

How is soy not vegan, though? It doesn't require a pollinator.

I second Tupelo Honey from WSP. That is always the one I use for test batches when I'm testing them myself. I love that one, hands down my favorite, no contest. If you're selling and you want something popular, I have found that WSP's Pineapple Colada is the most popular of all the ones I...

Do you have a cooler chest? Maybe put ice packs in it around the mold if you have a cooler chest big enough. You probably know this already, but don't use a wooden mold. Wood insulates, but you want the opposite of that. Use a silicone loaf mold (not a mold liner) so that heat can escape. Or...

You could try replacing a small amount of the beeswax with carnauba wax. It is much harder than beeswax. I would start with replacing 5% of your beeswax with carnauba, and go from there. Make sure you keep good notes so you remember exactly what you tried and what worked.

Not necessarily. Depending on the age of the soap, the oxidation ring could be pretty deep. Aleppo soap is traditionally cured for something like 9 months before selling it. You might only have a little bit of green in the very middle by then. Cutting a slice off the edge probably isn't deep...

I haven't, but mine are pretty small because I made a small batch, so might not have very much green inside anymore. I only bought a 2 oz bottle of Laurel Berry oil. I could try cutting one, and see what it looks like inside. I'll post pictures if I do it.

Am I the only one using 10 - 15% starch in mine? Everyone else seems to use a lot less.

Because when we all started discussing detergent shampoo, the OP went along with it as if it was helpful information. Almost every one of us mentioned the difference and asked for clarification from the OP. We never got confirmation one way or the other, just the OP going along with the...

What percentage of Laurel did you use, and where did you get it? I also used Laurel Berry oil that was brown, and Costco brand EVOO. My soap started out green and is about halfway to golden now.

I saw someone on YouTube do this, she had her son make it for her but then she put it in the oven to CPOP! She did promise to buy him a new LEGO set though.

She does have indices to everything, I think a lot of people don't realize that. Also she has ebooks which are probably a lot more organized than a bunch of blog posts will be.

I made a batch several months ago. The strong scent does fade after a week or so (unless you pick it up and sniff it) but the green is definitely fading, too. There's nothing you can do to prevent it (that I know of) so it's unlikely you'll inadvertantly do something to stop it. As long as you...

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