I'm adapting a recipe, I've posted my ingredients and quantities above. The lemongrass essential oil is only 2.5% of the total ingredients. Having looked online, I'm wondering whether I have enough liquid oil content, or too much solid? It seems to be the addition of the lemongrass which triggers a very rapid trace acceleration, but I dont see any referred to this in any of the recipes I have checked online. And yes I added the poppy seeds and lemongrass at the same time. If you have any advice or insight I would really appreciate it
Have you tried exactly the same base recipe using a different essential oil?
Lemon grass and poppy seed is not a combination I’ve encountered before (I’m not keen on seed inclusions because they leave bits in the bathroom sink and I’m not a fan of extra housework 😉) however plenty available online so it must be something that has been solved. Have a look at some of the online recipes available and see if the oil/solids ratio differs from yours.
The other potential issues could be temperature of ingredients, (soap making in the recent heatwave?) the utensils you are using (I use food grade plastic jugs, if you use metal containers that can have an impact)
Also do you weigh all your ingredients or use volume for some? If you have scales accurate to 0.1g (I appreciate most people won’t, I’m just a saddo) you could weight your essential oil (many recipes suggest drops which is ok but each oil has a slightly different mass/volume ratio and may affect your final percentage) so you get a reproducible recipe.
You could design an experiment where you make your base, divide it accurately by weight into four parts at trace, (pre weigh all your ingredients first because you won’t have long to add them):
try one quarter with the same weight off a different essential oil plus poppy seeds,
one quarter with lemon grass essential oil and no poppy seeds,
one with no essential oil or poppy seeds and
one with lemon grass and poppy seeds as tried previously.
Get someone to help in case you run out of hands!
Hopefully from that you’ll be able to isolate what is causing the issue and move on.
If it’s just the lemon grass try a different supplier, if they all seize it’s your base, it’s unlikely to be the combination of lemon grass and poppy seed since so many are commercially available but the other essential oil and poppy seed will highlight that.
They are definitely poppy seeds? If they’ve been muddled up with chia seeds which make an albumen-like liquid in water that might have an effect…
Good luck and let us know how you get on!