Lessons In Soaking

Here's a lesson in how NOT to soak off stamps.
Put these two Venezuelan stamps into soak the other night. One is damaged already, but I was interested in the stamp with the overprint.
Got preoccupied with something else (SCF I think!), turned off the computer and went to bed. Totally forgot about my little charges.
When I retrieved them in the morning, this is what I found.
See how the cancels have run?





Let that be a lesson to you children. Keep your eyes on the prize!

That reminds me of some older European stamps I think that where designed to have the cancel run into the stamp fabric. Some oil or wax based stuff or something.

Maybe Argentina does this on purpose? The kind of ink? To prevent some enterprising chap using some chemical or other to 'soak' the cancels off?

Here's another soaking tip, but it pertains more to the days before everything was self-stick and impossible to soak:

Some folks gather up all the envelope corners with stamps that came from Christmas cards, and throw 'em in to soak. If any of those envelope corners are red or green paper, the chances are good that some of them will immediately run, tinting all your other stamps red or green. The red or green corners I usually throw away; they CAN be salvaged by soaking in ice water with a fair amount of salt added. That fixes the pigments in the paper, but you have to get the stamps off as quickly as possible, then rinse them once or twice in hot water. Too much trouble = wastebasket. Case closed.

I don't know... When I soak Argentinean stamps for a more normal amount of time (20 minutes or so) they still look like that. I think as Puzzler said Venezuela stamps might have paper designed to do that. I don't think your overnight soak had much to do with that, although it probably didn't do them any good.

Just what I think, probably not all true, and most likely badly written given it's 12:30 at night.

What I think I see on the Venezuelan stamps is not water damage, but the spreading out of an oily cancel. Water increases the spaces between paper fibers, allowing miniscule traces of the ink to migrate outwards.