Handmade Soap: A Special Gift
It is only early October right now, but Christmas will soon be upon us. If you’re anything like me, you love creating homemade gifts for friends and family. There's something special about giving a handcrafted item, and homemade soap is one of those thoughtful gifts that everyone appreciates. It’s practical, personalizeable, and allows you to get creative with scents, colors, and ingredients.
I’m still relatively new to soap-making myself. I made my first melt-and-pour soap about two years ago, and for the last year, I’ve been making hot-process soap for my household. While I’m still learning, soap-making has quickly become a rewarding hobby. If you are just starting, I highly recommend beginning with the melt-and-pour method to see if you enjoy it. It is simple, fun, and you can create beautiful soaps without dealing with lye. You can do some really neat things with melt-and-pour. Although I do not have any fun tips for melt and pour, Jan Berry over at The Nerdy Farm Wife has a ton of great tips and ideas to explore. She also has a ton of great information on hot and cold process soap making, as well as ebooks and a soap-making course, her prices are as fantastic as her information.
Overcoming the Fear of Lye
For years, I dreamed of making soap but hesitated because of one intimidating ingredient: lye. Despite having a background in chemistry and being familiar with handling caustic chemicals, I found myself intimidated by working with lye. The stories I had heard about my great-grandmothers making soap the old-fashioned way—using wood ash to create potash lye and boiling it with rendered fat in a large pot over an open fire—kept creeping into my mind. What those amazing women did was dangerous and daunting.
While those older methods were risky, modern soap-making is much safer and more predictable.
Lye is a necessary ingredient in soap making as it is necessary to react with the fats (oils) to go through the saponification process. Lye is sodium hydroxide which is used to make solid soap, and potash lye is potassium hydroxide which is used to make soft or liquid soap. Lye is caustic, so you do need to use precautions when working with it, such as gloves, eye protection, long sleeves, and working in a well ventilated area.
Can you make soap without lye? No. Soaps made without lye are detergent bars, not soap (remember, saponification, the process of lye and fats combining, that's where the word soap comes from). If you are uncomfortable with working with lye just yet, you can start with melt-and-pour like I did. When you buy a melt-and-pour soap base, the saponification process has already been done, and more or less you are just fancying up that base.
Why Make Soap Instead of Buying It?
You might wonder why anyone would go through the effort of making soap when it is so easy to buy a bar from the store. While store-bought soap is convenient, many commercial brands contain ingredients that can be irritating, hormone-disrupting, or even linked to health risks like cancer. When you make your own soap, you have complete control of the ingredients ability to avoid synthetic chemicals often found in store-bought bars. Handmade soap is not only better for your skin but also allows you to create a thoughtful, personalized product. Here are a few reasons why making your own soap can be a healthier option:
Sulfate Detergents: Many commercial soaps are not true soaps but are detergents made with synthetic surfactants like sodium lauryl sulfate (SLS) or sodium laureth sulfate (SLES). These can strip the skin of its natural oils, leading to dryness, irritation, and potentially skin conditions like eczema.
Synthetic Fragrances: Most store-bought soaps contain artificial fragrances that can be irritating, especially for those with sensitive skin. These synthetic fragrances often contain phthalates, chemicals used to make scents last longer, which have been linked to hormone disruption and reproductive issues.
Parabens: Parabens are preservatives commonly used in cosmetic products, including soap, to extend shelf life. However, they have been a subject of concern due to their potential link to hormone disruption and breast cancer.
Artificial Colors: Many commercial soaps use artificial dyes to achieve vibrant colors, but these dyes can cause allergic reactions or irritation in people with sensitive skin. Some artificial dyes have also been associated with adverse health effects when absorbed through the skin.
Melt-and-Pour
Melt-and-pour soap bases are pre-made and ready for customization. All you need to do is melt the base, add personalized ingredients (optional), and pour it into molds. There are plenty of base options to select from, such as shea butter, goat milk, aloe vera, and honey. You can have fun adding essential oils, natural colorants, and even dried herbs to create a truly unique bar of soap.
Here’s a quick overview of the melt-and-pour process:
Cut – Cutting up the soap base into small pieces helps it melt faster
Melt – Use a double boiler to melt the soap base gently
Add Ingredients – Once melted, you can add essential oils, colors, or other additives
Pour into Molds – Pour the mixture into silicone molds
Let Harden – Once the soap has hardened, remove it from the molds, and it’s ready to use!
Melt-and-pour is a great way to ease into soap-making without the need to handle lye, and it allows for plenty of creativity.
Hot-Process Soap
Hot-process soap making is a bit more involved than melt-and-pour, but the work is rewarding. The key difference is that with hot-process, you work with lye and oils from scratch and cook the soap until it saponifies. The best part? Your soap is ready to use within a week—much faster than cold-process soap, which takes several weeks to cure. It is important to use a lye calculator such as SoapCalc, which is a free online calculator that helps you determine how much lye and water to use based on the types and amounts of oils you’ve selected. To use the lye calculator, simply add the oils that you plan to use, such as olive oil, meadowfoam, coconut oil, and castor oil, and specify the percentages or weights of those oils and the website will calculate the necessary amount of sodium hydroxide and water.
Tools Needed for Hot Process Soap Making
Dedicated crockpot
Digital kitchen scale
Safety gear: gloves and glasses
Heat-proof container for lye: glass Pyrex, or sturdy plastic
Stick blender
Dedicated wooden spoon
My Favorite Basic Hot Process Soap Recipe
15.9 oz olive oil (optionally infused with calendula and/or licorice root)
9.0 oz coconut oil
3.0 oz meadowfoam oil
2.1 oz castor oil (optionally infused with calendula and/or licorice root)
4.21 oz lye
11.4 oz distilled water (optionally substituted with calendula tea)
Some Tips for Beginners:
Start Small: Whether you are trying melt-and-pour or hot process, start with small batches (1-3 pounds). It is less intimidating, and if something goes awry, you will not have wasted too much material.
Safety First: Handling lye can seem scary at first, but with proper safety gear (gloves, goggles, long sleeves, and good ventilation), it becomes less daunting with practice. There are lots of tutorials available to walk you through the process safely. Heidi Villegas from Healing Harvest Homestead has a good video for beginners that walks you through the whole process.
Have Fun with Additives: Try experimenting with different essential oils, herbal add-ins, clays for coloring, if making hot process herbally infused oils, and teas in place of the water.
Don’t Be Afraid to Jump In!
Whether you start with melt-and-pour or hot-process soap, the key is to be safe and have fun. Soap-making is a constant learning process, much like baking, but it is incredibly rewarding, much like baking. The joy of gifting a handcrafted bar of soap to a loved one is truly special, and each batch offers an opportunity for your creativity to shine. As Christmas approaches, why not give soap-making a try? Start small, embrace the learning curve, and most importantly—have fun! You might just discover that making soap will become one of your favorite holiday traditions, right up there with baking cookies.
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