[BiomolecularLee]

Hopefully someone here can help me figure out why this happened...

I was making an Ivory soap solution in a 2 oz. Nalgene LDPE dropper bottle.  I started with distilled water, added a small stir bar, and put that on a stir plate.  Then I periodically added small pieces of an old Ivory soap bar in an attempt to make a fairly concentrated Ivory soap solution.  Total amount of soap I added was maybe 5 g.

After letting this sir fairly vigorously for 10-15 minutes, I noticed the pieces were gone, but the solution was turbid.  Bottle was slightly warm (maybe 35ºC) from the heat of the motor?  I put the lid on and tried to squeeze out a drop, but it was very difficult.  I took the lid off and tried to pour it out, but what came out was basically a very thick, stringy goo much like mucus (but it still smelled like soap)!  So it appears something polymerized, but I am at a loss to understand what in soap could (biochemist here, not polymer chemist)?

The issue of contamination may come up, but I took this bottle from a bag that appeared to be new bottles.  I rinsed it out with distilled water before I started.  Stir bar wasn't new, but it was from the clean group and I rinsed that too.  Distilled water should be clean, but we recently cleaned out our storage tank.  The water passed the silver nitrate test, so we think it's reasonable pure.

My gut feeling is that is has something to do with the bar of Ivory soap I used.  It's very old, sort of brown on the outside, and crumbles easily.  It very well could be 30+ years old for all I know.  According to Wikipedia, classic Ivory soap has the following ingredients: sodium tallowate, sodium cocoate or sodium palm kernelate, water, sodium chloride, sodium silicate, magnesium sulfate, and fragrance.

Can someone explain what happened here?  Is it possible we have some kind of microorganism involved?

[Borek]

I don't think anything polymerized, you just got a thick colloidal gel.