Nov 21 2007
Dreaded Orange Spots & Hot Process
Well, after hardening very nicely (enough that I could cut it, in fact), my first batch of soap has gone incredibly wrong this morning. It’s done something that looks a bit like the “dreaded orange spots” that are sometimes discussed by cold process soapmakers, but this looks even nastier. I’ll post a picture when I get a chance, but basically the entire batch — the stuff still in the pan, and the stuff I took out and played with — has begun oozing this sick-looking liquid. It’s dark, dark orangey brown. I messed with it a little and it appears to be nonpolar, so I’m guessing it’s mostly oil that didn’t saponify. Or maybe some horrible product of a different chemical reaction.
The dreaded orange spots seem to strike soapmakers at random, though they seem to favor heavily superfatted soap, soap involving canola oil, soap involving a lot of unsaturated oil, soap with rancid oil, and high heat and humidity. My soap did involve canola oil and a lot of other unsaturated oils, and I suppose it’s possible that the soybean oil was rancid (the others were definitely OK). I didn’t consider it at the time, but putting the soap in a warm oven when it failed to trace and set up properly may have been a problem as well, since it was effectively a hot, high-humidity environment.
There’s one other possibility. I’ve been looking at online posts complaining about the orange spots and there are a lot of people that have had this happen to very different soaps — multiple batches at a time (even a 100% lard soap, in one case). I also find myself thinking about the reddish-orange streaks that appear on our bathroom wall when we take a shower without turning on the vent fan. And so I’ve come to the conclusion that our tap water is of horrible quality. It must be full of crazy dissolved minerals (iron?) to leave those deposits on the wall, even though it’s crystal-clear in a glass. And I can’t think of anything in the oils or lye that would have produced the deep brown color that I find oozing from my failed soap. I’m going to switch to bottled distilled water for future batches and see if it helps.
Last night I tried out the hot process, mostly just for fun. (For those who don’t make soap recreationally, this is the old-fashioned process of cooking oil and lye in a pot, instead of mixing them and letting them sit at room temperature. The soap is safe to use almost immediately but isn’t usually as pretty or elaborate as cold process soap.) I made a small (~1 pound) batch of soap — olive oil with a small amount of palm oil. It went great, with the soap completely cooked in about an hour and a half. This morning it’s cool and very thick, though still far from hard. So either I just need to wait for a few days, or this new soap will also fail to harden and develop the nasty ooze. If that happens, at least I’ll know the water is to blame.
oh! you used tap water? I do think that might have something to do with it (Arlington tap water is a bit sketchy, so I used distilled).
The orange spots are an aesthetic problem only but it sounds like you had something else not go quite right. It actually sounds similar to the problem I had with my first batch — orangey-red oozing fluid. I’m not sure yet what it was: it wasn’t slick like oil and it wasn’t caustic, but I did add a lot of (distilled) water to try to bring that batch back from the early seize, so I think a lot of it was water.
You may be able to rebatch what you have and/or convert it to hot process… though when I attempted that with my failed batch, it didn’t work out so well (I ended up with this mess, which oozed like crazy and was clumpy/gritty).
When I cut my second successful CP batch (orange-cinnamon-clove, olive/palm/coconut) into bars on Monday night, I had a small sliver that I mis-cut, so I decided to try it out. It foamed! It smelled good! It was real soap! It was safe to use (as you know) but really needs a few weeks to cure to harden up a little.
I’ll be thinking good thoughts about your HP soap — and let us know if you attempt to rebatch the first CP batch.
Yeah, in retrospect using the tap water was stupid, but I just didn’t think about it given that it looks and tastes fine (and hasn’t killed the plants or animals in our fish tank).
I ordered some actual soap supplies (such as coconut oil) and I’ll try a batch with distilled water when they show up. In the meantime, I guess I’ll wait and see what happens to the HP batch. It feels like there’s still a lot of unsaponified oil in there, which really shouldn’t be possible — but it does sort of align with what happened to the failed batch before the brown ooze.
I’m not sure I’m going to attempt to rebatch the first batch, especially if it turns out that the problem is some sort of contaminant. I sort-of-rebatched it once already, when I reheated it after it went cold the first time. That stuff just does not want to be soap.
we do NOT give our fishies tapwater. We give them specially treated tap water.
I hate those stains in the tub, in the toilet, in the sink. so gnargnar