DIY Soap : Four Different Methods to Make Soap at Home Using Olive Oil, Fireplace Ashes, Caustic Soda, or Vegetable Glycerin.
Making scented soaps is very simple and you can also rediscover the pleasure of recycling and DIY, which these days is not bad for your wallet, your health and the environment. The soaps on sale on supermarket shelves in fact contain non-natural ingredients: confirmation of this is enough to read the labels. But let’s see in detail how to make soaps at home using natural ingredients.
On this page we will see how to make soap with leaching , a long and complex process, or by using shortcuts. We will give you four different ways to prepare soap at home.
Contents hide
1 DIY Soap Bars
2 DIY Soaps: The Recipe
3 How to Make Soap at Home with Ready-to-Use Kits
4 How to recycle used soap bars?
4.1 Ready-to-use base for making soap at home
5 How to Make Lye, Homemade Soap
DIY soaps
- Essential oils of your choice
- Extra virgin olive oil
- Marseille soap
- Fresh whole orange and lemon peels
- Blender
- Grater
- White sheet of tissue paper
- Molds: containers to be recycled, preferably made of plastic that does not alter the soap and allows for easy extraction.
Instructions for the molds to use to make scented soaps :
you can recycle small rectangular baking pans, plum cake pans, plastic food containers, and various types of packaging. Single-serving fluted pudding molds, yogurt pots, or ice cream molds are good small molds. The perfect material for the molds is plastic, which does not alter the soap and allows for easy extraction.
WARNING: do not use aluminum molds, it is a metal that reacts with the soap altering its characteristics and making it very difficult to extract.
DIY soaps: the recipe
- Cut the peel of two lemons or two oranges into small pieces, then pour the pieces into the blender, adding a cup of water
- Blend the contents at maximum speed until you obtain a uniform mixture, then pour it into a large steel pan.
- Reduce a 300 gram piece of pure Marseille soap into flakes, using a grater.
- Pour the flakes into the pan with the previously prepared cream and mix
- Place in a bain-marie and leave to cook covered for about 15 minutes, stirring delicately from time to time.
- As soon as you notice that the soap is softening, add a tablespoon of extra virgin olive oil, a tablespoon of essential oil of the scent you like and mix for a long time to combine everything well.
- Dust the molds with talcum powder and pour the freshly prepared soap into the molds.
- Wait for the soap to solidify before removing it from the molds.
- Place the soaps on a sheet of white tissue paper and leave to dry away from direct sources of heat for 5 or 6 days, taking care to turn them over often so that they dry evenly.
How to make soap at home with ready-to-use kits
There is no shortage of ready-to-use kits on the market for making soap at home . To give you an idea, we recommend a very complete product that uses ready-to-use ingredients.
This kit allows you to make scented soaps at home starting from vegetable glycerin and cosmetic perfumes. These are DIY soaps based only on vegetable glycerin so the soap obtained will be transparent. Inside the purchase package there are bottles of cosmetic perfumes, harmless but still synthetic … for a natural soap you can omit the perfumes and replace them with aromatic herbs and essential oils.
To prepare it, you will need to melt the base in a bain-marie (or in the microwave) and then possibly add the aromas or chopped mint leaves or essential oils.
How to recycle used soap bars?
When preparing it, you can also add the residues of used soap bars to the base. The kit includes 10 molds, cosmetic perfumes with pipettes, colorants and 450 grams of glycerin. It can be purchased on Amazon for 28 euros and free shipping.
For all the information I refer you to the Amazon page: Scented Soap Kit
Ready-to-use base for making soap at home
Those who want to save money compared to the product mentioned above but do not want to go through a production process such as leaching can take advantage of ready-to-use preparations of natural origin.
From vegetable glycerin and lye (two natural products), you can make moisturizing soap for skin care. It is not difficult to make moisturizing and emollient soap to make your skin soft and well hydrated. You just need to use the right ingredients.
I would like to point out the base for making soap at home , it is a natural and ready-to-use product made from Castile soap (natural lye) and vegetable glycerin. Simply melt the product in a bain-marie and then add essential oils, carrier oils, dried flowers or even better, other vegetable oils such as coconut oil or cocoa butter to give the finished soap moisturizing properties.
