Good Morning as a follow up to your suggestion on making salt bars, I find salt bars "sweat" a lot and so its difficult for to sell unless its a custom order. Even wrapping in saran wrap doesnt help.. it gets messy. How do we prevent the "sweat"/
Okay, I don't know much about soap making yet, but I do know about salt.
Did you use natural salt like Himalayan or dead sea salt? Those attract moisture from the air and "sweat". Something like table salt shouldn't do that.
Used in a high enough quantity, any salt will make soap sweat, unless the soap is stored in a fairly low-humidity environment. Since "salt bars" usually contain 50% to 100% salt as a percentage of oil weight, they can and frequently do get sweaty. I happen to live in a fairly dry area, and only use 50% salt, so my salt bars don't sweat until I leave them in the shower, where the shower steam does cause sweating.
Regarding Dead Sea Salt, that should not be used in soap at all. The minerals and other compounds will not only cause the bars to sweat; the soap will eventually dissolve into a gooey messy puddle.
Himalayan salt is typically way too scratchy to use in soap; it can actually cut the skin. I've had good luck with the finely ground Himalayan salt from Costco, but I seem to be an anomaly in that.
I think it's hard to make a blanket statement when there are so many variables around the world.
I made salt bars with an equal amount of table salt to the same amount of oils. (100% salt or a 1:1 ratio of salt to oils). I live in a very humid area during the summertime, but there are far more humid places on earth, and even in my own country, so I decided to do a test of said soap in a higher humidity climate. I also wrapped my bars in Shrink Wrap, the smell-through kind. I did not leave any holes in the shrink wrap knowing that I'd be going to a high humid area; I double shrink wrapped a couple of bars because they had a tiny hole at the seams and I wanted to be sure they were as well wrapped as possible.
With the shrink wrap on tight and not opened, the bars did not sweat in the high humidity of Hawaii on either of the two islands where I tested the soap. I left the soap (wrapped) outdoors on the lanai for 48 hours and still no sweating.
But as soon as I removed the shrink wrap, they beaded up like dew on the morning grass and never lost that dew except while in use, then later beaded up again as they sat around in the humidity.
Now, I cannot say that had I been in Jamaica or Florida or a rain forest that the result would have been the same, because I truly do not know. I also know that plastic wrap is permeable so some moisture can pass the barrier (
reference), so eventually, I do believe the high humidity would be a problem if I were to leave these shrink wrapped soaps out and exposed to the humidity.
However, I do NOT keep my wrapped salt soaps out in the open. I keep them inside a box where they are protected from the humidity.
So my suggestion to anyone living in a very humid climate is to shrink wrap your salt soaps AND store them in a container like a cardboard box with a tightly fitting lid and possibly put a desiccant in the box with the soaps, and check on them regularly to see if the desiccant needs to be replaced. Additionally, if your humidity is so high that it makes your cardboard boxes soggy (I have seen this happen in high humidity), you may need to take further measures to reduce humidity in your storage area, such as a dehumidifier.