Weird soap...

Ok, so the new year started, and I made the firm decision that this year my life was gonna change. Period.
So yesterday, I started by making a deep cleanup job in my place. Nothing like the depression that accompanies being unemployed for all kinds of stuff getting accumulated everywhere.
Then, as part of the cleanup (still in progress), I found a box, almost full of my old soap bars, most of which had developed varying degrees of DOS. After looking at them, I decided I was gonna use them as laundry soap, so I sat down with a knife, and started to cut away the DOS affected parts, and chop the bars in pieces.

But here's the weird part: some of you may remember the chicken fat soap I made little more than a year ago. I still had several small bars of it, with very little DOS along the edges. But when I went to cut them off...THEY WERE ROCK HARD!!!
But I'm not talking "difficult to cut" hard: they had the consistency of hard candy! They literally SPLINTERED when I tried to cut them!!!

Have any of you ever had a soap (not a salt bar) getting that brittle?

i keep my old soap in a humidity controlled box and they should be pretty dry. . . I haven't cut any of those though. . . Thats quite interesting as by all accounts chicken fat should have made a soft soap. . . i can't wait to try the chicken fat in soap. . . We have some time coming up in chinese new year. . . Will keep you posted about that. . . I will also cut a bar or so to see how hard it got. . .

Yeah, that would've been my prediction, based on the soapcalc numbers. I remember I didn't use 100% chicken fat, but I don't remember the exact recipe.
However, at SNL, Tanya and Lindy said that castille and 100% coconut tend to get that brittle with time. What's strange is that the other soaps (some of which are almost 3 years old) were hard, but not brittle...

It would really be interesting to know or try and puzzle out why that would be... the hardness must have something to do with the orientation and shape of the soap molecules... and how closely they interact and bind to the molecules next to them... i want to read up a little about it... i read something before about soap hardness but have to find it again...

Let me know what you find out...

Sometimes soap does that, I have a very old chai tea soap that splinters when I try to cut it.