surf girl
Well-Known Member
So. As reported in this thread http://www.soapmakingforum.com/forum/vi ... t=cinnamon , I made some soap and it inexplicably seized.
Um, yeah. Maybe that had something to do with the MASSIVE EXCESS OF LYE. Almost a week later, it dawned on me that I had not used any palm oil when making the soap. Hmm, thought that recipe called for palm. Checked, and yup, yessiree, there should have been palm in there. So I had shorted a 2-lb recipe a full 8 oz of palm oil. For a 5% superfat, I should have been using around 3.4 oz of lye; for a 0% superfat, it's still between 3.4 and 3.5 oz lye. I used a whopping 4.3 oz of lye.
Interestingly, I rebatched the soap 4 days ago (my "immediate rebatch" was a non-starter), and it no longer zaps. Washed my hands with it today, and it is not burning. It has a very slippery feel, like a base can do, but that may be the silk which I had added for the very first time. I suspect it would be a very drying soap - hard to tell with one handwashing.
So, just FYI, you can have a fair amount of excess lye with no zap (this would be 20-25% excess lye). Which is to say that zap may not be an entirely reliable way to determine excess lye.
Um, yeah. Maybe that had something to do with the MASSIVE EXCESS OF LYE. Almost a week later, it dawned on me that I had not used any palm oil when making the soap. Hmm, thought that recipe called for palm. Checked, and yup, yessiree, there should have been palm in there. So I had shorted a 2-lb recipe a full 8 oz of palm oil. For a 5% superfat, I should have been using around 3.4 oz of lye; for a 0% superfat, it's still between 3.4 and 3.5 oz lye. I used a whopping 4.3 oz of lye.
Interestingly, I rebatched the soap 4 days ago (my "immediate rebatch" was a non-starter), and it no longer zaps. Washed my hands with it today, and it is not burning. It has a very slippery feel, like a base can do, but that may be the silk which I had added for the very first time. I suspect it would be a very drying soap - hard to tell with one handwashing.
So, just FYI, you can have a fair amount of excess lye with no zap (this would be 20-25% excess lye). Which is to say that zap may not be an entirely reliable way to determine excess lye.
