Homemade Natural Soap
Although there are many reasons why people make homemade natural soaps, one reason is that it is easy. With just a few pieces of equipment and utensils, along with ingredients that are not hard to find, you can be on your way to making sweet-smelling soap for soft skin.
Just as with making anything homemade, there are tips for being successful. Therefore, we wanted to address some of the common mistakes seen with making soap at home.
First, you always want to double and even triple check your recipe, making sure you have the right ingredients, quality ingredients, and the correct amounts. For instance, you will find hundreds of recipes online that use lye. While most of these are accurate, before you begin the soap-making process, use a lye calculator to make 100% certain the recipe amount is right. You can locate lye calculators by using Google.com or any number of search engines.
Second, you always want to weigh your ingredients for accuracy. While some people are good at guessing, with homemade natural soap, it is imperative that ingredients are to the drop. In addition to fragrance, accurate measurement will also ensure you end up with a quality bar of soap and not something greasy and messy. For this, you want to use a quality scale, keeping in mind that smaller batches mean you need your scale extra fine-tuned. In fact, many people who make soap for personal use or occasional gift ideas thus making small batches will often choose a scale capable of measuring down to 100th of an ounce. The only ingredient you would not need to stress over is water, which can be measured using a standard liquid measuring cup.
A common challenge in making homemade natural soap is coming up with the right texture. If your soap is coming out too hard or too soft, chances are, the problem has to do with heat. Typically, people will get the soap too hot, especially while the soap mixture is being stirred. While this issue is common for all handmade bath soaps, it is more of a problem for small batches or soaps made with high olive oil content. To correct this problem, pay close attention to your heat.
You then want to take care with mixing your handmade soap ingredients, especially when using lye. Most often, the instructions on the lye package will have some type of special instruction specific to stirring, advising against anything rigorous, thus causing a problem with separation. When mixing your bath soap ingredients, too often people go overboard. Instead, an excellent piece of equipment to add to your soap-making arsenal is a stick blender.
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Using a stick blender to mix the ingredients is a great way to end up with smooth soap. If you go this route, it is important to blend using short bursts. The key to success in this case is to avoid over whipping, which would create bubbles in the soap. When the soap mixture has been blended, pour it into the mold, which will continue to heat. Now, if the mold is deeper than one and one-half inch, we recommend you invert a piece of cardboard or wood on top of the mold to help it gel better.
Finally, if you plan to use fragrances for your handmade natural soaps, purchase only quality essential oils and then, purchase from companies that have actually tested the fragrances using soap made with a cold process. If you were to use something cheap or the wrong type of fragrance for your soap, you would end up with a serious problem of separation. Although many failed batches can be melted again and saved, you are virtually starting over, which is time-consuming and frustrating.
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