After 25 years of soap making, I still make boo-boos!
Soap making is part baking and a science experiment. Under the right conditions the experiment turns out and its handmade soap. When a recipe is off, the soap needs a little more baking to be soap!
I made soap on Monday and cut the bars the next day. I would have posted pictures of them but they were on the soft side and I didn't want to handle them too much as it would cause dents in the bars. This morning when I went out to my soap shop, they were fine, but I forgot my phone/camera.
The soaps just needed a few extra hours to saponify (cook) as it normally takes about 48-36 hours for cold process soap (a method of soap making) to turn into a solid loaf of soap. For my recipe it takes about 18 to 24 before I can take the soap loaf out of the mold cut into bars. Then they still are not fully soap for another day.
As for Monday's soap making adventure, I'm not sure why my soap was on the soft side when I cut them. When I make soap, I master batch my soap making oils, making a quad batch of oils. When I'm ready to make a batch of soap, I will put the heat on the master batch and mix it all up and measure out one batch of oils. I think this last time maybe the oils didn't get mixed up well enough, likely more sunflower or olive oil and less tallow, throwing off my recipe slightly. I say slightly because it really didn't effect the soap in the end except taking longer to finish going through the soap making process (saponification).
I expect the soap to be very mild by the end of it's cure in 4-6 weeks! The pH of soap is usually 7-10 on the alkaline side of the scale. I think mine will be on the lower end, 7-8 pH. Very non-drying as far as soap goes.
So everyone knows. There is no such thing as a moisturizing bar of soap unless you're using a beauty bar like Dove, which isn't traditional soap, but made with surfactants having a pH of less than 7. There is nothing wrong with products like Dove, some types of skin require less pH so beauty bars are needed.