Why does lye burn your skin

Lye is an alkaline chemical that is known for its caustic nature. When working with it, the lye can damage surfaces that it comes into contact with, including your skin. Lye is sodium hydroxide. It comes in liquid form, flakes, or crystals. Sodium hydroxide comes into being when soda sodium carbonate and lime calcium hydroxide come together and cause a chemical reaction. Before you could buy lye in a bottle, people used to make it from raw materials.

They used it for tanning hides and making soap. To make lye, they would burn hardwoods at high temperatures to make white ashes. Then, they used a mixture of water and baking soda to penetrate the ashes and help remove the lye from them. Next, they filtered out the ashes.

That left them with water that held enough lye to make soap and dissolve the fat from the animal hides. After all, if lye is in our soap, how bad can it be? Lye can corrode lots of things like metal, plastic, paint, cloth, and your skin. When mixed with water, it can cause a fire. People use lye for all sorts of products that you probably use around the house every day.

For instance, drain cleaners contain lye, as do paint strippers and silver polish. But the most common use for lye is soap. For those people who like to make their own soap, they have to work with lye. That includes our very own range of handcrafted coconut milk soaps. Lye is a caustic substance that can certainly damage your skin if you're exposed to it. It can cause a number of problems, such as burns, blindness, and even death when consumed.

But, and this is a big but, soap that is created with lye which is all real soap will do absolutely no harm to your skin.

You see, the lye used to create soap reacts with other chemicals, which results in the formation of soap. The lye gets entirely used up during the process, which means it's no longer present and can do no harm to your skin. Our range of coconut milk soaps will soothe and nourish your skin, leaving your skin feeling soft and smooth.

If your soap is real soap, then it has been made with lye, period. However, it's not uncommon to find lye or sodium hydroxide missing from the list of ingredients on some soaps. If that's the case then lookout for the following terms:. These are all alternative generic names for lye. For example, sodium tallowate is the name given to a mixture of tallow beef fat and sodium hydroxide lye.

It's still lye, even with the fancy name. The short story is that you need lye or sodium hydroxide. Lye is mostly commonly found in things like Draino to clean drains. It is also used to react with fats like olive oil or coconut oil to make soap. So, no gloves.

I made the most delicious batch of Fresh Baked Bread soap today. It smells amazing, it acted like a dream and soapmaking was a snap. I was set up, weighed, measured, traced and poured in about 20 minutes. Then clean up time.

Cleaning up fresh soap is a bit of a pain. This is because it is essentially thick, sludgy oil. I am a bit concerned that I may have a lye burn, and I am loooking for some feedback on what to expect. After 18 hours the soap was hard enough to take out of the mold - and I cut it. In this stage is the soap still raw, and not good to handle? What should I expect a lye burn to feel like? How long does it take for the lye to neutralize from the soap, so that I can handle it freely?

I also noticed that my stick blender was getting some bubbles in my soap, and it has a few pockets with liquid in them. In 3x3x2 bars I would say there are pockets about 3mm in diameter with a very small amount of clear liquid. Does this definitely call for a rebatch? After handling the soap to cut it, I sat at my computer maybe 20 minutes later. Touching my hands to my eyes and lips out of habit, my lips tingled a little and my eyes itched for 30 seconds.

Is this just a reaction to the soap? Or did I expose myself to a lye solution left over from the process. I'm also curious about testing strips. I have cheap pool testing strips that give me a basic Ph readout, but I'm looking for something more precise. It would be especially nice if I had something that could detect and warn me about heavy bases like something that would be caustic. Did you rinse your skin off really well?