Separating soap and water

[Dchall_San_Antonio]

This is sort of a morph question, but anyone who knows what's going on can contribute.
For many years I've been making foamy soap by diluting regular hand soap and running it through a foam dispenser. Now I have a problem with the soap separating and floating on top of the water in the mix.


That separation happens about 10 minutes after I stir it up.

Here is the label for the soap.


Is there an ingredient there which would lead to separation?

[MorpheusPA]

It's not so much separation as it is not breaking up the gel very well. You're working with a more gel-like substance, slightly lighter than water overall, that's not fully dissolving and separating and floating to the top.

Try starting with really hot water. That should help. Beat the crap out of it when you shake it.

[Dchall_San_Antonio]

Does any of the ingredients lead you to the gel conclusion? I just want to avoid setting myself up for problems in the future.

[MorpheusPA]

Several. Glycerin (a gel), peg-120 yada yada is a thickener and emulsifier, and surfactants themselves tend to gel a bit naturally.

[Dchall_San_Antonio]

Update: Using the foamy dispenser didn't work. The dispenser dispenses the contents of whatever is in the tube...which is also separated. So the stuff coming out the top was the pink at first but then it's the clear. Also the foam never felt nice and luxurious.

So I poured the separated stuff back into the original squirt bottle and just use it. So I'm working through the clear stuff at the bottom first. It feels fine like soap should feel. Too bad because I liked the fragrance of the Dial Himalaya Salt and wanted to make a foamy version.

Thanks for the hints/tips, morph. I have some hand soaps that convert to foamy with excellent results. I'll compare and contrast ingredients. I may check back with you on this.

[MorpheusPA]

Some as do, some as don't mix with water well. That's, scarily, actually true with bar soaps as well. Olive soap? Slimy and unpleasant unless you age it to death (I have soap I made in 2019 that's just becoming decent stuff if your definition of decent is "doesn't have extensive slime trails.")

My hand soap sets up in about seven days. Look for things that are coconut-derived to mix well with water (palm kernel will also do this). Palm, lard and tallow should do meh to OK. Olive, laurel, and the classically gentle soaps mix very poorly.

[bpgreen]

This might be a dumb question, but would adding sooner emulsifying wax to the mix and bringing it to a boil possibly help?

My gut feeling is that it probably wouldn't, because e-wax is used to gett the oil and water to mix, which already happened. But maybe since there's more water, more e-wax would help?

[MorpheusPA]

That's not dumb at all, as I didn't think of it. It's worth a shot, as is just raising the water temperature to 160-180 or so (boiling water can create major froth with soap).

[bpgreen]

I mostly use e- e-wax when making lotion, and it has been some time, but now that you mention it, I think I didn't actually boil anything. I think I just heated it until everything melted and mixed together.

[Dchall_San_Antonio]

I wash my hands a lot, and I like the feel of foamy soap. I also like the idea of economizing on foamy soap by finding a non-foamy version with a nice fragrance and then diluting it by 50% or more to make a foamy version. For awhile I would buy regular soap refills by the gallon and dilute large batches. Then I discovered the soap department at Dollar Tree where you can get about a pint for $1 and not $1.25. Last week I was at Dollar Tree and found the Dial Himalayan Salt soap and bought two more to use as non-foamy. Buying non-foamy for $3 to $4 or more (Bath and Body Works ) stings my pride a little, but $1.25 at Dollar Tree is just fine. Our local grocery store creates their own labels of items and has some decent hand soap fragrances, but no gallon refills, yet.