Teach Soap

Last night I made a soap with two layers. The bottom layer was a solid color. The top layer was 3 different colors (red pigment, titanium dioxide, green pigment) swirled together. The soap looked great when I put it into the mold, but as I kept going back to spray soda ash I noticed that in a couple of areas on the surface of the soap the colors and swirls were beginning to look grainy. This did not happen all over - just in some areas on the surface of a few of the bars. When I unmolded the soap to day the grainy-ness was obvious. The texture of the rest of the bar was perfect. What the heck?

So here are the things that I'm wondering about. First, I don't yet have a mini-mixer to disperse my colorants. Titanium dioxide is often a challenge without the mixture, but my ultrahydrated chrome green pigment always mixes beautifully, and the red pigment that I used also looked good when I mixed it. And if it was because the colorants were not mixed in well, wouldn't I see this grainy texture throughout ALL of the colored swirls? Second, I put the soap in a thick wood mold, covered it, and used a heating pad to encourage gel. Did it turn grainy because it was too hot in spots? I'm out of other ideas! The soap still looked nice and will work for gifts to friends and family, but I would not feel comfortable selling it. How can I keep this from happening again? Thanks for your advice!

Wood insulates well. The soap should gel on its own or with a light blanket. You should not need a heating pad to get the soap to gel. The parts that were grainy either got too hot, pushed air bubbles to the surface where they created pock marks or the color was not mixed well enough. That's my 2 cents.

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

OK, good to know that the heating pad was a little much. I also forgot to mention in the original post that I had peppermint EO in the top swirled batch. Not sure if that would make a difference or not.

My peppermint EO is well behaved. I don't think that was it.

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