Susanne's Crafty Corner: Cosmetics

Making your own soap (DBHP)

home made cupcake soap Making your own soap probably isn't as cheap as factories can make it in bulk, but you do know exactly what's in it. Besides that it's really fun to do and makes great gifts. Below you'll find a step by step guide to make soap with the so called  "double boiler hot process" method. But let's begin at the beginning:

  1. You need a recipe

Soap is made by mixing fats with a precise amount of lye (NaOH, can be bought as sink unclogger) and water. Basically you can use any kind of fat/oil (except mineral oil off course!) in any combination to make soap. You do have to know how much lye is needed per kind of oil. Therefore the "soap recipe template" or the MMS lye calculator comes in handy: You select any kind of fats you want to use, fill in the amount and voila: it is calculated for you how much lye and water you need (in weight)!

You'll see that there is an option for "lye discount". This means that a little bit less lye is used then is actually needed to saponify all of the oils. This is good because too much lye will be very bad for your skin and a bit too much oils will just make your skin feel good. For this reason sometimes a bit of extra oil with special benefits for the skin is added just before pouring into the molds, this is called "superfatting". Lye discount and superfatting actually are exactly the same. Usually the lye discount is in the range of 5 - 8 %. When going over 10% the soap becomes "oil heavy", this means that there are to much unsaponified oils in there to make a nice soap. Oil heavy soap tends to be a bit on the soft side and feel greasy. if you stay in the 5 - 8% range everything will be all right.

When making a recipe it is important to use 50 - 60 % "hard oils". These are the kind of oils that make your bars of soap hard. These can be lard, tallow, olive oil, palm kernel and coconut oil. I'm probably forgetting some, but those are the most common hard oils. From the last two you shouldn't use more then about 15 - 25 % because they can be drying to the skin in high amounts. Coconut, palm kernel and castor oil improve the lather of your soap. For the rest, just try it out.

For the not so adventurous among us recipes can be found here or you can look in the links section for inspiration.

You can use:

  • Fragrance or essential oil to scent your soap.
  • Filler material like bran for scrubbing qualities or lavender flowers for decoration.
  • Superfatting oil. Nice oils for this purpose are:

Almond Oil (Sweet)
Apricot Kernel Oil
Avocado Oil
Hemp Oil
Jojoba Oil (liquid wax)
Castor Oil
Cocoa Butter
Shea (Karite) Butter
By absence of these, you can also use Olive Oil

  • Color, natural colorants are:

Cayenne Pepper - Salmon color
Cinnamon Powder - Beige
Cocoa Powder - Coffee to Brown color
Curry Powder - Yellow Peach
Paprika - Peach
Turmeric - Golden Yellow
Dark squares of Cooking Chocolate - Brown
Liquid Chlorophyll - Light Green
Dried dill or parsley - Green specs
Carrots - Orange
Hibiscus - Pink to purple
Alkanet root - purple

  1. You need utensils 

  • A stick blender, this redues the stirring time with 20 to 40 minutes. If you don't have a stick blender, make sure the recipe you use has a maximum ratio of at least 50% hard oils to 60% oils or better... or you'll be stirring all day.
  • A kitchen scale to measure all the ingredients.
  • A heat resistant non-aluminum container: aluminum dissolves in lye!
  • 2 Large pans, 1 fitting into the other for "au-bain-marie"
  • Something to stir with
  • Rubber gloves can come in handy
  • Safety glasses
  • Mold or molds, you can use chocolate, cupcake or cookie molds, shallow bowls or 1 large mold. When using the large mold you will have to cut up the soap later. Pringle and milk cartons make nice improvised molds.
Warm the fats

  1. Lets get to work!

Heat a lot of water in the large pan. Measure the fats and put those in the small pan on another stove, melt this mixture and heat it up a bit. Dissolve the lye by stirring it into the determined amount of COLD water. This is very important because otherwise it can volcano out of the container; lye can cause burns! If you do get a bit of lye water or soap mixture on your skin, first rinse with a lot of cold water and then dab with a little vinegar. The acids in the vinegar neutralize the lye. If you get lye in your eyes despite the safety glasses, rinse with a lot of cold water and get to the hospital as soon as possible. Lye burns can be really nasty so be careful when dealing with it.

The lye in water mixture will heat up a lot in a matter of seconds... be aware that it will get really hot. Your aim is to heat up the fats and cool down the lye mixture to approximately the same temperature. Besides the fact that you can get burns when you spill lye, it will also produce fumes during the first minute or two. After that... the solution turns clear from its original milky appearance and there will no longer be fumes present.




Measure the lye and cold water


Blend mixture When the lye and the fats are about the same temperature, remove the pan from the fire and pour the lye solution into the fat. Use the stick blender or mix it by hand.The soap ideally should look smooth and develop a "satin" finish as you blend and stop to check it. When using the stick blender, periodically turn it OFF and use it as if it were a spoon to stir the soap, since the motor can burn out otherwise.


Trace At some point the surface appearance will change and develop some dullness...patterns can be seen in the wake of the blender of whatever you are using to mix it. You want to make sure you have true trace (the thickening stage)... not just something that has emulsified and appears thicker than it really is. Stirring for a minute with the blender off will "stir down" a false trace, but not a true one. You can also watch the way how the soap coats the guard: it should be like thin to medium pudding. Count on 3 to 10 minutes mixing, depending on the recipe when using a stick blender and about 20 to 40 minutes when doing this by hand.


Place the small pan in the large pan After this is done, remove the plug from the stick blender and clean it up a bit with kitchen paper. Place the small pan with the soap a la "au bain marie" in the large pan. Occasionally stir and let it warm until the entire mixture has gone into "gel-stage": in this stage the soap becomes a bit translucent and gel-like. Before the soap is gel, it will go through some other stages, though. 


Rolling boil First you can see a stage called "rolling boil". Note though that some all- vegetable soaps don't go into rolling boil at all. Stir it down before it climbs out of the pot. After that soap 'grits' or 'curds' will appear; the soap will separate into a clear liquid and the "curds". Don't be alarmed this is normal and also known as the separation stage. Just stir a bit and eventually the soap will come together again. Don't have pics of separation....


Gel stage Once the soap has come together again after separation it will go into gel stage. You can recognise gel by a couple of things. First it will have a slightly translucent vasalin like look. Also when getting a sample with a spoon you will notice the soap rather sticking to itself then to the spoon; it will drip of leaving the spoon "clean". When you rub a bit of the soap between your fingers it will behave a bit waxy.

Once the soap has reached the gel stage two different approaches can be followed: the traditional method and one more commercially used. This last one involves boiling the soap in salt water to remove any excess lye. If you used a lye discount this generally isn't necessary but can be usefull when making transparant glycerin soap. For more information, go to the alternate method page. For the traditional method, just read on below.

You can test the soap for it's lye content by carefully testing it on the tip of your tongue (keep water handy). If you get "zapped" there is still lye left and you'll have to boil it slowly a little longer. If the consistency of the soap is very thick though, you might want to add a bit more water.

Once the soap has reached this stage and doesn't "zap" anymore, goodies like superfatting oil, scent and color can be added. You can even give the soap a swirl or marble effect by scooping part of the soap in another container and mixing it well with your colorant. After that you can stir the colored with the uncolored soap. 


Soap in the moulds

  1. Filling the molds

Now the time has come to fill the molds. You'll have to work quick since at this point the soap begins to harden up a bit faster. Fill the mold(s) and be sure to fill them completely by pressing the mixture into it. Smooth the surface and then leave the soap to harden up completely. For small molds this can be after 20 minutes, for larger it takes a bit longer. In the meanwhile you can clean up the mess you've made!


End result: the base soap Remove the soap from the molds carefully and cut it up in pieces. You will be able to use the soap after you've removed it from the molds, although it will harden more in the next couple of days. 

  1. Rebatching

Sometimes a batch doesn't come out the way you want. Before you throw it away you'll have to realize that it is often possible to rescue the batch with a process called "rebatching" or "remilling". To rebatch fresh soap it is enough to grate the soap and warm it au bain marie. Soap that is already a few weeks old needs a tiny bit of extra fluid added.Not too much, just enough to let the soap dissolve a bit and make it easier to melt. If it's too thick you can always add more later on. You can use water but also milk. I like milk very much because it makes the molten soap more "liquid", it however discolors your soap to brown. I let it melt for about half an hour and stirr some. When the soap is pudding like and completely smooth without lumps you can color it and add more or other scent.

Final note

If you have been researching the web on making soap you've probably noticed that most methods and recipes don't involve heating, but let the soap "cure" instead. That is because most websites deal with the so called "cold-process" approach of making soap. I prefer the hot-process method because I'm way too impatient to let my soap cure.

You'll have to make sure that the recipe you use is correct, so always check in a lye calculator if you've got the amounts of lye and water right. You can still screw up with the recipe which I learned the hard way! If you would to learn more about the soaps & mistakes I made, click here. As for this method I suggest that you just try it and find out for yourself what you like best; this approach or the one described on the alternate methode page. On the links page you will also find more websites about soaping methods.

Despite the different approach this site gives a lot of nice reading on making soap yourself.

For a few ready to measure and make recipes click here.

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