Can I Rebatch This Lye Heavy Soap????

by Shay
(Ontario, Canada)

I made a batch of soap a few hours ago and used a fragrance called toasted sugar and vanilla and my soap seized and I mean really seized to the point it looked like the texture of cottage cheese. Thick hard and lumpy. I thought it was the fragrance that did it. So I molded it anyways to see what would happen.

Well the soap hardened within 2 hours (if that) and it is very dry. So I went over my recipe and realized that I had put in 6 ozs of lye when I should have put in 4.04 ozs of lye. I was reading the recipe wrong! I put in the excess fat amount which is 6 ozs and should have put in the lye amount which is 4.04 ozs.

So now I'm thinking that may have been the reason for the seize of the soap. Anyways can I rebatch this lye heavy soap and make new soap out of it and if so how much oils and water should I add to the rebatch????? I do also plan to try this fragrance again in a new batch to see if it causes a seize or not.

Thank you to anyone that can help me this is the first time I've read a recipe wrong like that LOL

Answer:

This might be tricky and you could be running the risk of losing even more ingredients than just throwing out the soap but if you would like to give it a go....

You will need to play with the recipe in a lye calculator. Start by gradually increasing the weight of the oils in the recipe until the lye amount reaches the dreaded 6 oz mark.

You would then have to subtract off of the recipe the amounts of ingredients that you used to make the soap in the first place. Whatever is remaining will be what you have to add to your soap.

To do this I would suggest grating up the botched batch and adding it along with the remaining needed ingredients (extra water and oils) into a pot and following the procedures for rebatching soap. I cannot say for sure if this will work or not but it may be worth a try.

Good luck,
Cathy