My first failure

[Carly B]

But there's hope! I think....

Made a small batch yesterday. New recipe I made up, making soap stones (which I love to make because I've always loved rocks and stuff), hubby was home (I usually make soap when I'm home alone), etc.

Excited to try my new recipe, and I usually do 2:1 lye/water, 5% superfat, etc..

Poured it into the molds, sat down at the computer to make my notes, and realized that I had LEFT OUT the castor oil.

As I said, it was a small batch, originally supposed to be 16 0z of oil. Castor was supposed to be 5%, .8 oz, or 22.68 gms. I ran the numbers through soap calc again keeping everything the same, except no castor, and it showed that without the castor, it had a little more than 2 gm of lye too much.

Unmolded and did a zap test this morning--a little zap, but my first time ever to have a zappy soap. I'm hoping given the small lye excess and the minimal zap time will take care of it.

But rats.

 

[DeeAnna]

I agree with your thought to let it cure.

For one thing, fresh soap can be slightly zappy even with the expected superfat.

2 grams of extra NaOH in your batch is not a lot of excess lye. A slight lye excess like this does dissipate over time. Kevin Dunn, author of Scientific Soapmaking, did some experiments with slightly lye-heavy soap and found this to happen. My experience has been similar.

Also remember that your NaOH is not 100% pure, but most soap calcs assume NaOH is 100%. The difference between the actual purity of your NaOH and 100% is what I call "hidden" superfat. That difference of 2% or more will add a safety cushion too.

 

[Carly B]

Thank you, DeeAnna. I was hoping you'd jump in and tell me everything was going to be OK.