Rebatching basics – why the heck you should (or shouldn’t) rebatch your soap.

Rebatching soap is the process of melting down existing soap and turning it into a new soap. Some soapmakers dread it, possibly because they feel they are trying to “save” a batch that failed for various reasons (be it an undesired scent, color, design, or an omission of an ingredient) and don’t want to remember the “fail”. But another reason to rebatch soap is to utilize soap scraps! Those end pieces, shavings, and other “leftovers” from the production process that would otherwise go to waste.

There are four basic methods to rebatch your soaps:

1. A standard  rebatch – melting down and remolding. Typically, you’re just melting down existing soap with minimal additives such as a small amount of liquid or additional superfat.
2. A partial rebatch – melting down with new oils and making a new soap. While similar in concept to a standard rebatch, only a portion of the final soap comes from old soap (hence the “partial” part of the name).
3. Confetti soap (Ciaglia is a type of rebatching too, but I consider it a kind of confetti soap which we’ll talk more about in the cold process rebatching tutorial).
4. Salting out soap – some cool science to extract the saponified soap from any impurities. We’ll go over this in more details in a separate tutorial, and make some laundry soap while we’re at it!

The first two options are based on HP (Hot Process) soap making and can make some amazing soaps. Confetti and salting out soap are unique to themselves and will be covered in future tutorials.

The following chart and details will help you figure out which method will be most suited to your needs:

Lye heavy

If your soap is lye heavy, the safest saves are salting out or a partial rebatch. Sure, you can do a standard rebatch… but you have to be very diligent in blending and ensuring you don’t end up with any lye pockets. I much prefer salting out lye heavy soaps.

High superfat

If you’re rebatching because you ended up with too much superfat in your soap, I highly recommend the partial rebatch. Salting out is suitable as well, but a partial rebatch is more time efficient.

Wondering why you might have too high of a superfat? You could have miscalculated your formula when resizing, Maybe your sodium hydroxide was too weak, or maybe you “whoopsie” add too much of one of your oils.

Regardless of why your soap is soft and oily from too high of a superfat, a partial rebatch will fix it up in a jiffy.

Ugly soap

If there’s nothing wrong with the soap, but it’s just doesn’t make you smile, you can use any method to rebatch it. Heck, you could even just use it as is! Maybe close your eyes while showering and imagine it’s the perfect most beautiful bar ever? But seriously, I get it. We want pretty soap. And, sometimes turning something ugly into something beautiful is extremely rewarding. And let’s face it, we’ve all made ugly soap at one time or another!

I typically use my ugly soaps to make my Christmas Coal soaps. I’ve included this recipe in the partial rebatch lesson of the Hot Process Rebatching Tutorial… but you’ll also see a great save of ugly soap in the Ciaglia lesson of the Cold Process Rebatching Tutorial.

Smelly (or not so smelly) soap

If the only thing wrong with your soap is the aroma you have a few options. A partial rebatch will let you smoothly melt down the soap and either dilute the aroma or you can add more aroma in after the cook. Grating the soap up for a confetti bar provides the same option – add more or no scent to the new soap base. And then finally, salting out soap can remove the aroma.

I forgot to add something, HELP!

If you realize that you neglected to add something to your recipe, there are oodles of options for you.

• If the something your forgot resulted in a lye heavy soap, I really do recommend salting it out, but a well blended partial rebatch with light shreds can work too.
• If you forgot to add a color or aroma, consider any of the rebatching options to turn it into something new. You’ll add the color or aroma at the appropriate step for each method.

If you’re not sure what’s wrong, and you just know you forgot something, salt it out! That’s the safest way to handle any unknown in the soapy world.