Have you cut them yet? I'd love to see how they look cut.
So you ask if these overheated. I am wondering why you ask that. Did the soap start out very warm when you poured? What did you use in your recipe that would contribute to heating of the soap? How warm was the environment prior to your concern about the color? Also what was your lye concentration? What specifically was your recipe and process (in detail)? Did you make both logs from the exact same soap batch, splitting the batch in two for the pour? Or did you make two separate batches, one for each log? All those things make a difference in the gelling process.
If I make a Castile soap with only olive oil and a very low lye concentration ('full water' which is the default in the
lye calculator), my soap will not gel at all without lots of added heat. However, my (full water) 100% CO soap will gel without added heat because coconut oil and lye create a lot of heat.
So I wonder what is going on with your recipe and if these came from the same batch of soap.
Your soap on the left really looks like it is covered in ash. Under the ash I bet you will find a very pretty color, once you clean it off. One other thing I have noticed is that lye heavy soap will produce a lot more ash than soap that is not lye heavy, gelled or not gelled, so that's why I ask if these logs came from the same or different batches of soap batter.
Here is an example of how ash muted my colors in one of my soaps and how they looked after steaming off the ash.
As you can see the ash really muted the surface colors of this gelled Castile soap. The 'marbles' were made separately, and I also made this soap over a 2-3 day period, so it has three separate batches of soap put together for the effect. I used full water (the default in the
lye calculator) and 0 SF
