It sounds like you, like many people today, are thinking of making your own soap to avoid the dangerous chemicals in industrially produced soaps. It’s a goal worth striving for, as almost everyone I know who’s tried homemade soap doesn’t want to go back to store-bought soaps, ever. Here’s how to make organic soap in the comfort of your own home.
If you leave out all the extra ingredients that go into a complete homemade soap project, like scents, etc., then soap can be made by mixing lye (also known as sodium hydroxide, a chemical found in nature) with different fats and oils. This is called cold process soapmaking because the mixing is done only slightly above room temperature, just enough for the fats to melt.
Before you begin, you need to prepare a bleach solution by mixing the bleach with the proper amount of water. Since this starts a chemical process, the solution becomes hot and you must give it time to cool to room temperature.
Most of the initial hassle of starting soap making is buying or making the tools. You’ll need a mold to place the liquid soap in for it to sit in, you’ll need a pot to melt the ingredients, a jar to hold the lye solution, a candy thermometer to measure accurately, etc. A stick blender is also essential to mix the ingredients; this can help you achieve traces in five minutes, while mixing with a spoon could take you two hours!
Keep in mind that bleach is caustic and can burn your skin when you spill it. Learning how to handle lye safely is the hardest part of learning how to make organic soap, and you should wear rubber gloves and plastic goggles while you’re doing it.
But once you feel confident with bleach, don’t delay in getting started! Look at all the things you already have in your kitchen that you could use for this purpose, and buy anything else you need.
Then you just need to find a recipe that you like: different oils and different amounts of these will give you all kinds of soaps, less or more lather, moisturizing or not, etc. Go buy the components and remember to check the labels to make sure they are organic.