Lush Lab Shop — Cold-process soap and small-batch | lushlabshop.com
Two windows cover most home batches: 4–6 weeks for a standard recipe, 6–8 weeks for high-olive Castile — counted from the cut, not the pour.
The cure clock starts when the loaf is cut. A standard cold-process loaf unmolds at 24–48 hours and is sliced into bars of 100–120 g; each bar then sits on a rack with air on every face. For a balanced recipe — a typical mix of olive, coconut, and supporting oils — the wait is 4–6 weeks.
High-olive and all-olive Castile recipes run longer: 6–8 weeks, with the biggest gains in the final fortnight. The reason sits in the saponification values — olive oil needs only 13.5 g of NaOH per 100 g against coconut's 17.8 g — so olive-heavy bars start softer and harden slowly.
On narrow screens, swipe or scroll the plate sideways.
What happens if the cure is cut short: the bar keeps its excess water, so it softens at the sink, dissolves in days rather than weeks, and gives a thin, fleeting lather. None of that is a safety defect if the lye math was right — it is simply an unfinished bar performing like one.
Special recipes shift the handling rather than the window. Salt bars firm up quickly after unmolding and are best cut early in the 24–48-hour window, before the loaf turns too hard to slice cleanly. Milk soaps are mixed cool to protect the milk sugars, then follow the same 4–6 week rack cure as a standard batch.
The reliable way to call time is not the calendar but the bar itself: weigh one bar weekly, and when the number stops dropping, press a pH strip into a wet lather — 9–10 means finished. That testing routine is detailed on the pH and shelf-life page, and the full pour-to-wrap schedule is on the homepage.
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