My soap become GREEN in the middle

[Lia chalid]

Hello guys, I totally don't understand how it becomes like this.
Is this bad..? Can we use this soap or not?

This happened when I cut it after 3 days in a mold.

I will show you guys the recipe, and FYI I've change the water with coconut milk, and add 2 tbsp of carrot puree on this batch.

And I also add 1 tsp of salt before lye, and 2 tsp of sodium lactate.

Please tell me something if you know about this condition and maybe you have experience on this.

 

[Marsi]

It could be something in the Olive Pomace oil.

Looking at your soap picture, particularly the square shape (which matches the external shape of your soap), it looks like there's a rind.

What I mean by "rind" (and I don't have a better term than that) is the colour change that happens to some soaps when they are exposed to the air (either during the cure, or when a larger piece is cut open). This is easily seen on soaps with vanilla in them (Vanilla soaps, without stabilzers, go from a cream colour to a deeper shade of brown during the cure).

So ... my take on this is that it is a normal thing for your ingredients and process, and your soap will end up completely creamy

Nice looking soap btw

 

[lenarenee]

Has this happened with other soaps - using the same oils?

There is a phenomenon called "partial gel" ....soap saponifies hotter in the center of the mold than the outer ring. It leaves a darker colored circle in the middle. I've never known it to make a square shape.

I think Marsi is on to something about the "rind". Look at this video about Aleppo soap (made only with olive oil and laurel berry oil). When the soap is first made it's all green. But when it cures, the outside turns brown (oxidizes) but the inside keeps some of the green color. The bar in the video is fully cured (6 months or more....I can tell because of how the bar has shrunk and lost it's perfect cube shape.).

 

[DeeAnna]

Soap showing partial gel will always have an oval or round pattern that is based on the temperature profile of the soap when it was at its hottest. Due to the physics of how energy travels through matter from a heat source, this pattern is always spherical, oval, or cylindrical. I think this bullseye pattern can become less obvious as the soap cures, but in my experience it's never entirely disappeared.

A partial gel pattern will never have a square or rectangular "rind" like this soap has. A rind is a color shift due to a chemical or physical change that starts at the surface of the soap -- things like exposure of the soap to air or moisture evaporation.

With time, the entire surface of the soap will have the same color as the rind you see. If you cut into a bar after it's cured, you're likely to see the original center color at first, but the color of this freshly cut surface will gradually change to the rind color so the bar again appears all one color.

 

[earlene]

I have used pomace OO that is a very dark green, but even if the middle looks green in the beginning, it fades with time and exposure to air. So just give it time. It may turn a sort of a tan color, and not a sharp white that some folks get from very light colored olive oils.

Also, although you did not use much carrot purée, the carotene in it would alter the green to make it a bit more brown or tan than green. So a light tan or beige (or perhaps a pale 'khaki') is what I would expect from this soap.

The soap is not bad because of the color, just unexpected when you have not had this experience before. As long as you followed your recipe and did not make any huge weighing errors, your soap should be fine to use after a decent cure time.