SCIENCE! Lye Volcano! Wine Soap is Not Happening Today!

Soapmaking Science! Now THAT is an exothermic reaction! Yes, I have gloves, googles, and mask on AND I'm using the vent on high (as I always do). And yes, it was very cold/mostly frozen in the beginning.

I have made lye solutions more times than I can remember without a hitch, but two very unique things happened here. And I have dealt with both individually but not together. It has also been a long time since I have recorded this part, so pretty lucky to have captured it on video.

Sodium Hydroxide (lye) is absolutely required to make soap. No lye, no soap. But you cannot just add lye to the oils. It must first be dissolved in a liquid before being emulsified with the oils - and that liquid then eventually evaporates out during the cure (there's more to it, but that's a quick explanation). There are tons of liquids you can use to add different benefits to the final soap. And you ALWAYS add the lye to the liquid, not the other way around. Because if you do, it will do this but worse. Not safe!

SO for this particular batch, I wanted to make a wine soap. And I knew that wine (and beer) do funky things when the lye is added - did you catch those awesome color changes? To prepare the wine (or beer), you make sure it is flat and then boil it. Then freeze it before making the lye solution because it gets even hotter than normal. I have done this and was prepared for that reaction.

Now here's the tricky part. I have started using Citric Acid in all of my soaps (only at 1%). This wonderous little thing acts as a chelator in the final product as it extends the life of the oils and helps prevent soap scum. This must be dissolved into the liquid before the lye is added. And this also causes it to get even hotter than if you were to use just normal water. I typically use ice water.

Final result - I melted the frozen wine just enough to fully mix in the citric acid before adding the lye. And with the combination of everything was just toooo much. If I do this in the future, I will do a separate citric acid solution.

You can see that it shrunk my well used dish cloth. This went from just above freezing to over 220⁰F in seconds! I actually had the cloth under there to catch condensation as the ice was melting and so glad I did, because it made clean up much easier!

Last little bit - use thick, food grade plastic containers (code 2 or 5, this one is a 5) - never glass and never, ever aluminum.