It looks like you, like many people nowadays are thinking about making your own soap so you can avoid the dangerous chemicals in industrially-produced soaps. It’s a worthwhile goal to strive for as almost all the people I know that have tried homemade soap don’t want to go back to store-bought soaps, ever. Here is how to make organic soap in the comfort of your own home.
Making your own soap at home isn’t just for your grandmother anymore. For quite a while, this hobby has been increasingly fashionable among young and artistic people. Because the creative freedom that making soap offers is a great outlet, the soap is chemical-free, and it costs less than buying — once you’ve done the initial investments — knowing how to make bar soap has far-reaching benefits.
If you haven’t read anything about this before, you might be apprehensive of such a complicated process. So I’m glad to tell you that making soap at home is much easier than one would expect. The basic process consists of mixing lye (also known as sodium hydroxide), a naturally-occurring chemical, with fatty oils or fats. These can be anything from animal fat to olive oil or coconut oil.
If you leave out all the additional ingredients that go into a complete home-made soap project like scents and so on, then soap can be made by mixing lye (also known as sodium hydroxide, a chemical that can be found in nature) with different fats and oils. This is called cold process soap making because the mixing is done only slightly above room temperature, just enough for the fats to melt.
Before you start, you need to make a lye solution by mixing lye with the proper amount of water. Since this starts a chemical process, the solution heats up and you need to give it time to let it cool to room temperature.
Most of the initial hassle of starting to make soap is buying or making the tools. You would need a mold to put your soap liquid into to set, you need a pot to melt the ingredients into, a pitcher to hold the lye solution in, a candy thermometer for exact measuring, and so on. A stick blender is essential as well to mix the ingredients – this can help you achieve trace within five minutes, whereas mixing with a spoon could take you two hours!
The choices vary widely, and this allows you to make your own recipes which suits your own needs. For example, by adding more of certain types of oils such as coconut oil, you get more lather in the soap, if that’s what you prefer. Shea, cocoa butter and hemp oil are known for their moisturizing properties.
