Teach Soap

Hi everyone.

About three weeks ago I made a large batch of CP soap using olive, coconut, castor, palm kernel, and sweet almond oils. I added Brambleberry.com's Energy fragrance but didn't bother with colorants. I also discounted the lye about 8%. Everything went as expected during the processing and the soap lather is consistently showing a pH of right around 8.0. My concern is that the soap feels somewhat drying to the skin. Is this something that can be corrected through rebatching or should I just use it as a lovely scented laundry soap?

if it still feels drying with an 8% discount, I'm not sure rebatching and adding more oil will fix the problem. You could shred and then add it to a fresh batch to recycle....if you'd like to share the percentages of your recipe, we may be able to help you troubleshoot.

Ditto what Vinca Leaf said. It could be your combination of oils and formula that caused the drying feeling. Have you used the same recipe before and achieved different results? I had the same experience with one of BB FO's called "soapy clean." Used my standard recipe and after I tried it in the shower, I would have sworn I had ants crawling all over me because of the itch from dry skin. I attributed it to the FO because the same recipe with different FO's or EO's didn't do that.

If this is your regular recipe, it could be the FO. Sometimes the soap gets better after a nice long cure. I would put it away for a while and try it again. I'm not sure how well this soap would work as laundry soap, since it has a 8% superfat. It could make your laundry dingy.

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Irena
Closed minds are like faulty parachutes; they refuse to open.

Thanks for the replies, everyone. It looks like it might have been a random accident. Today I tested several other bars from the batch with no problems at all. While I'm relatively confident that the bars are ok, I'll keep this batch for personal use just in case.