This summer my daughter and I got into making soaps testing new silicone molds that I had made. Since we go camping a lot we needed a great camping style soap. We decided that our camping soap was officially going to be the potato.
One thing I noticed that a couple hours after we had poured that soap started to become wet. I was half thinking that I put to much fragrance oil into my soap. I looked at the percentages and they were fine. Actually I did poured less than the suggested amount of fragrance oil.
Our soap was weeping or as some call it “glycerin dewing”. We made at least 7 soaps that day and they all were weeping. There was no way I could sell these soaps even if I wanted to.
Glycerin is in most MP soap bases. That is what we were using. Glycerin is known as a humectant where this substance naturally attracts moisture and air to itself causing this weeping.
Some of the causes:
- Humid Climates
- Overheating MP soap in a microwave. This disrupts the water balance in the soap
- Adding to much fragrance or additional oils
I was wondering what you could do. The humidity was pretty high this summer, but I know people still pour. I have heard of some people not pouring at all in the summer. They would make all of their soap before hand. I thought that was a great idea, but that just limited the amount of soap you could make that year.
Then I had heard to use a fan on your soaps. I took my fan back out of storage and turned it on my soap. I kept it on my soap for 12 hours. Voila! No weeping.
What do you do to prevent “glycerin dew”?
Many Blessings,
Dawn
