Why does oil leak from soap?
- Thread starter katre
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We’d love to help, but most of us here cannot read what you wrote. Are you able to rewrite this in English?
Sorry that i wrote english but my pc translated it my native language.
My formule
olive oil - 900 gr(%56)
coconut oil -400 gr (%25)
palm oil - 150 gr (%9)
castor Oil - 150 gr (%9)
Aqua - 528 gr (%33)
Naoh - 223 gr
I mixed it with a mixer for 10-12 minutes at about 45-48 degrees. When it became like pudding, I poured it into the mold
olive oil - 900 gr(%56)
coconut oil -400 gr (%25)
palm oil - 150 gr (%9)
castor Oil - 150 gr (%9)
Aqua - 528 gr (%33)
Naoh - 223 gr
I mixed it with a mixer for 10-12 minutes at about 45-48 degrees. When it became like pudding, I poured it into the mold
Thanks @katre that helps a lot. Your recipe looks pretty good when I run it through the calculator. Your temperature and mixing process sound fine, as well.
Your lye concentration is actually closer to 29%, not 33%. Did you use the water-as-percent-of-oils setting by any chance? If so, I'd recommend using the lye concentration setting instead, at 33%. Your 29% concentration is a lot of water that can cause the bars to stay soft for a longer time, but it should not have caused the problems we are seeing in your pictures.
Was the lye completely dissolved in the water before you added it to the oils?
Did you use any fragrance oil, essential oil, or other additives, like clay, salt, sugar, micas, etc.?
Your lye concentration is actually closer to 29%, not 33%. Did you use the water-as-percent-of-oils setting by any chance? If so, I'd recommend using the lye concentration setting instead, at 33%. Your 29% concentration is a lot of water that can cause the bars to stay soft for a longer time, but it should not have caused the problems we are seeing in your pictures.
Was the lye completely dissolved in the water before you added it to the oils?
Did you use any fragrance oil, essential oil, or other additives, like clay, salt, sugar, micas, etc.?
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Hard to tell from the pictures, but I wonder if the soap could be sweating?
@lenarenee i thought of that, too, but the bars appears to have holes with darker liquid or spots around them, as well as darker swirls here and there. It looks to me like unmixed FO or EO, with potential lye pockets being a distant second.
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Yes, noticed that too but just wasn't sure if the lighting in the picture was showing things accurately. I think it's best the op learn to zap test.
yes it looks like sweating, but oil comes out
Can you let us know if you used any fragrance oils, essential oils, or any other additives?
Also, are you 100% positive that the lye was completely dissolved before adding it to the batter? And there were no chunks or crystals in the lye solution?
I'm pretty sure the caustic is completely dissolved in the water. I mixed it many times.
I did not use any essential oil, essence or any other material in this soap. but there are soaps in which I added turmeric - cinnamon - tar to the same formula and this did not happen in soaps.
The photos show turmeric soap, pine tar soap and cinnamon soap. There was no problem with them.
The room where I dry the soaps has about 55% humidity and the temperature is about 30 degrees. It's a stuffy place, no wind. Could it be for this reason?
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I have had soap look like that a couple of times.
Once was when I used a spicy smelling fragrance oil that seeped out of the bars of soap. It never stopped doing that over the course of the life of the soap & I hated it so much I eventually tossed them. I did try re-batching some of the soap, but the fragrance carried through & since I could abide the smell, they also got tossed.
The other time was when I used rancid oil, that I tried to clean with a method I found online, but it did not really work very well because the soap developed DOS fairly quickly.
If you did not use a bad-behaving fragrance, which it sounds like you did not, and you are sure your oils were fresh, I'd suggest that perhaps it was a weighing error. That can happen sometimes. Sometimes it's a fault of the scale (turning off or bad batteries). Sometimes it is just user error. The weight error can be with oils or with the lye. It can also be weak lye. Is the caustic from the same bottle (or vessel) as used for the other batches that gave you no problem? Is this the most recent soap that is leaking and the older soap did not sweat oil? If that is the case, I'd probably suspect the NaOH may have gone off due to too much exposure to room air (humidity) or a new bottle that is not as pure as the previous caustic you used. Was the NaOH clumpy at all?
I would rule out the room as the cause if some soap sweats oil but the other soap does. Unless you had a huge change in the environment in that room when you put out the newest soap, it would not make sense to me that the environment in the room would cause one soap to sweat and the rest to remain dry.
Once was when I used a spicy smelling fragrance oil that seeped out of the bars of soap. It never stopped doing that over the course of the life of the soap & I hated it so much I eventually tossed them. I did try re-batching some of the soap, but the fragrance carried through & since I could abide the smell, they also got tossed.
The other time was when I used rancid oil, that I tried to clean with a method I found online, but it did not really work very well because the soap developed DOS fairly quickly.
If you did not use a bad-behaving fragrance, which it sounds like you did not, and you are sure your oils were fresh, I'd suggest that perhaps it was a weighing error. That can happen sometimes. Sometimes it's a fault of the scale (turning off or bad batteries). Sometimes it is just user error. The weight error can be with oils or with the lye. It can also be weak lye. Is the caustic from the same bottle (or vessel) as used for the other batches that gave you no problem? Is this the most recent soap that is leaking and the older soap did not sweat oil? If that is the case, I'd probably suspect the NaOH may have gone off due to too much exposure to room air (humidity) or a new bottle that is not as pure as the previous caustic you used. Was the NaOH clumpy at all?
I would rule out the room as the cause if some soap sweats oil but the other soap does. Unless you had a huge change in the environment in that room when you put out the newest soap, it would not make sense to me that the environment in the room would cause one soap to sweat and the rest to remain dry.
I thought it was a weighing error: But some of the soaps I made at different times had a problem, and some did not. Especially the soaps I put turmeric-cinnamon-tar and aromatic oil were very strong. I suspected it was because of the humidity in the environment. And I decided to do an extreme humidity and low humidity test. For this test, I increased the humidity to over 90% in a closed box with water on the bottom. In 5 days all the soap was soaked. They almost melt 
I put a desiccant (silica gel) at the bottom of the box where I did the low humidity test. The soaps have held up pretty well overall. But I learned this: Soaps don't dry after they sweat. They need to dry in a low humidity place from the very beginning. Now I will produce larger quantities in a place with low humidity, I hope I can obtain dry soaps as I want.
(By the way, I also did a wind test, an outdoor test, a sun dry test, but the main problem seems to be humidity)
I put a desiccant (silica gel) at the bottom of the box where I did the low humidity test. The soaps have held up pretty well overall. But I learned this: Soaps don't dry after they sweat. They need to dry in a low humidity place from the very beginning. Now I will produce larger quantities in a place with low humidity, I hope I can obtain dry soaps as I want.
(By the way, I also did a wind test, an outdoor test, a sun dry test, but the main problem seems to be humidity)
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How long has the new soap been curing?
It's been a week for this photo. It takes 30-45 days to dry completely.
If it doesn’t zap after a week, I’d let it sit. I’m starting to learn that time heals most soaps.
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