Soft bars and short life

"It melted away in a week" is the complaint that decides whether somebody buys a second bar.

The commonest customer complaint

A soft bar dissolves fast, goes mushy on a dish and is gone before the customer feels they got value.

Which matters more than almost any other property, because bar life is the thing a customer measures against the supermarket bar they were buying before.

Formulation causes

Too much soft oil. A high olive or high soft-oil recipe makes a mild bar that needs a long cure and is never as hard as a balanced one.

Not enough hard oils or stearic and palmitic contribution.

Too high a superfat, which leaves free oil that is not soap.

Too much water, which is a cure question rather than a permanent one.

The lever makers often reach for is adding a hard oil or a small percentage of stearic contribution, and it works.

Process causes

Under-curing. The biggest and the easiest to fix. A bar sold at three weeks that needed six is a soft bar, and it would have been a hard bar with patience.

Which is why the cure is confirmed by weight rather than by the calendar, and why cure space is the real constraint on a soap business.

Stacked curing, where the bars never dried at all.

Humid storage after curing, which puts the water back.

The customer half

Half of every short-life complaint is the soap dish.

A bar left in standing water or in the shower stream dissolves regardless of how well it was made.

A draining dish and a spot out of the spray doubles the life of a good bar, and saying so on a card is the cheapest fix available, and it is a statement about the soap rather than a claim about skin, so it costs nothing in the category determination either.

References