What magical thing is this :D?

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Piero

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Hello people,

Long time not doing soap and being here. Hope everyone is doing well :) :)

I have seen a lot of development and it will take me weeks to slowly get up to speed with the forum and everything else :eek:

Two days ago I made some soap and when I cut it, today, I noticed this strange effect, that I have never seen or experienced. I made four different kinds of soap, however they all come from a mother batch and just have different essential oils and colors. You can see them all below here:
IMG_20230729_145014.jpg
IMG_20230729_145027.jpg
IMG_20230729_145038.jpg
IMG_20230729_145049.jpg


They do not look like lye pockets. However, I am not 100 percent sure what exactly those darker spots are. Are they stearic spots?
What could they be?
I am afraid I might have not mixed well and they could be clumps of kaolin clay

I am very puzzled on how sometimes I do things and cannot understand how I managed to get to this end result :D :D :D

I am looking forward to your inputs.
 
Since these appear to be cut pieces of soap to me I'm wondering if perhaps you didn't get one of your hard oils/butters/wax completely melted and then it broke down during the saponification process leaving a small void behind.
 
There appears to be two issues here - one is the stearic spots from your hard oil/butter (cocoa or shea?) not fully melted, OR soaped too cool and they created spots. The other is the pink soap where the colour was not properly dispersed which has created red spots. You should always mix your clays thoroughly into a slurry before adding.
 
Since these appear to be cut pieces of soap to me I'm wondering if perhaps you didn't get one of your hard oils/butters/wax completely melted and then it broke down during the saponification process leaving a small void behind.

That day I had to stop the melting since I had to be a witness to a friend to get a new online ID. Everything got melted once, then I left it there and came back 40 minutes later and melted everything over 54 degrees Celsius. I guess this could have caused this. I will try one more time this upcoming week and see what happened and what I did differently.

There appears to be two issues here - one is the stearic spots from your hard oil/butter (cocoa or shea?) not fully melted, OR soaped too cool and they created spots. The other is the pink soap where the colour was not properly dispersed which has created red spots. You should always mix your clays thoroughly into a slurry before adding.
I noticed that as well about the color. I will need to double check how to properly do slurries because I always fail there :D :D
Can I make slurries with a little bit of olive oil and then adding the clay or micas?
Sorry do not want to go too much OT.
 
Can I make slurries with a little bit of olive oil and then adding the clay or micas?
When using clays, oxides, pigments...I mix with distilled water. The exception to this is TD as I find it mixes in better without accelerating trace.
 
When using clays, oxides, pigments...I mix with distilled water. The exception to this is TD as I find it mixes in better without accelerating trace.
Ok, cool beans. I will need to try it and get back to ya :) :)
 

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