How long will a bar last without going rancid?

Dixie

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Feb 26, 2020
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It would be a nice feature if there was a calculation that showed the longevity of a bar in storage, not in shower use. Some oils in soap cause the soap to go rancid faster and this would give us a better idea if our soap will last longer in case we store it for a while. I know the higher polyunsaturated fat oils will go rancid faster.
 

Yooper

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Sep 7, 2019
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Upper Peninsula of Michigan/ Florida Gulf Coast
I can’t watch the whole video- but what I saw doesn’t help us come up with a calculation on providing the estimating the rancidity, besides knowing the properties of linoleic acids, etc. I don’t know how the software can come with a number to guess if a batch will get DOS or when, for example. That seems to be a video on the basics of properties of fatty acids, which we use to calculate what we already calculate but rancidity seems to be difficult to calculate.

Software is all about calculating and numbers, so we’d need a way to incorporate a formula to guess at a likelihood of rancidity and when. I don’t know if such a thing exists, but my thought is that it does not or I’d have seen it something in the last 10 years or so if it was available.

What we do know is that high iodine numbers in the soap calculator would produce a softer soap. Softer soaps will go rancid more quickly.

There are so many things that go into rancidity- oxygen, storage conditions, ingredient combinations, humidity, superfat amount, etc- that we’d have to have a pretty standardized way to come up with the formula for guessing that. Some soaps will get DOS, some won’t- and they could even be the same ingredients but are stored differently.

That’s a really tough one!
 
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