How to make your own soaps from cooking oils

May 22, 11:15 PMSacramento Nutrition ExaminerAnne Hart

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Make your own hard soaps from instruction and recipes online starting at Miller’s Homemade Soap Pages. Also check out the home-made soap recipes at the Essortment homemade soap recipe site.  When you make soap, you might make an olive oil and grape seed oil soap.

Try creating home-made lavender, coconut oil, or mint soap. Make unscented, soothing olive oil soap with a creamy glycerin base. Make special soaps to which you're not allergic. 

If you have a favorite edible flower that's not toxic to your skin, try making a soap from the scent. Work with lemon blossoms, orange blossoms, or rose petals. Or make turmeric and saffron or cinammon and cloves soaps.

Try aloe vera, sweet almond, walnut, avocado, macademia nut oil and coconut, or jojoba oil-based soaps. Test the oil on your skin first to see what feels right to your skin. Customize and tailor your home-made soaps. Add flavorings to soaps such as vanilla.

How Do You Make A Basic Face And Bath Soap?
It’s amazing what you can make with glycerin. Use it to get out stains from clothing by soaking glycerin and water on the spot. Or add a teaspoon of glycerin to soaps and home-made shampoos to add a moisturizing, lotion-like effect. Can you make soap for yourself at less cost than buying it commercially at the market?

Soap can be made cheaply in the old fashioned way or creatively with olive and grape seed oils. It’s all about what you want to do with your soap, use it frugally yourself. Sell special hand-made soaps as gifts to earn money at home. When you make soap from scratch, using a cold process, you’re performing saponification. This is a chemical process which converts most types of fat into soap by reaction with an alkali called lye.

Use distilled water when making soap. Soap-making kits are for sale online. All of these kits and special soaps with expensive ingredients are fine. Check out these online soap making supplies at Soap Makers Supplies.com.

You can spend more money buying soap making supplies, kits, and making expensive soaps to sell or use for yourself. Or you can live on less by making soap cheaper than you’d pay for commercial soap. What you have is control over the ingredients.

Compare what it cost you to make soap to what you spend to buy commercial soap. Depending upon the ingredients you put into the soap, home-made soap can be made for less, if you have the time and want to work with the ingredients such as lye and certain fats, beeswax, or olive oil. Look over the available supplies and excellent instruction online at the Soap Makers Supplies.com site.

See the site for making basic cold-process soap using either fats or oils. Resource: The SoapMakersSupplies.com site lists  soap- making supplies needed. The site has detailed information on how to make your own soap. Consider the superior quality of home-made soap that you make yourself.

Also check out the supplies and instruction in soap-making recipes at the Pioneer Thinking  site. When at Soap Maker Supplies site, view the many soap-making recipes. You can choose the cold process or the melting process. If you want to make soap from scratch the way it was done in the past, choose the cold process method. Try some variety in shapes and scents.

Regardless of what recipe is used, chooe a favorite soap, such as the home-made olive oil soap. For variety, add orange blossom scented water. Another favorite scents of many home-made soap users and makers is lemon-scented soap. Many people choose a soap with an oil or creamy base. Use cooking oil such as olive or grape seed oil.

The melting process involves simply melting soap you already have and re-shaping it or adding scents, textures such as oatmeal or almond meal, and oils—for example olive or grape seed oil. You can melt already made soap by putting it in a sealed plastic bag and heating it in 120 degree F. water.

The cold process of making soap from scratch requires that you work with lye and fats or oils. Soap for the face should be creamy or have an oily and/or moisturizing feel, but not feel greasy, as if you coated your face with petroleum jelly. Let your skin breathe.

Feeling oily is different from feeling greasy. Oil is absorbed by the skin as it would be if you used a moisturizer. It’s light and never greasy. Make sure you prepare everything in advance before attempting to make your own soap.

Lay out all the ingredients and equipment first before starting. Don’t forget essentials such as safety glasses, vinyl or latex gloves, and a water and vinegar solution for washing and neutralizing any caustic lye that touches you or other equipment.

You can start from scratch and make your own soap using lye and fats as people did in historic times. Or you can grate a bar of ivory soap with a cheese or potato grater and then melt it in a pan over a very low heat adding food flavorings such as vanilla or almond. Add any scent that appeals to you and pour the melted soap into a bowl.

You can add oat meal and chopped nuts or a scent of jasmine, lavender, melon, or musk oil perfume. The scent would be expensive, though. Artificial vanilla would be more frugal. These hand-made soaps can be put in gift baskets. You also can add olive oil or grape seed oil to your soaps.

If you’re starting from scratch, you’ll need to use lye. You can’t make soap without lye unless you make soap out of your old bits of soap such as pan-melted ivory soap with added ingredients such as meal (oat meal) or scents. You also can use an old bottle of rose cologne or rose-petal water, orange-blossom water, or any type of safe and healthy scent that doesn’t cost more than the original soap.

You might choose a site that shows you how, step-by-step to make  lye soap from scratch. Since lye is caustic and has extremely bad fumes, keep the lye away from children and use a child-proof cover on its container.

Lye burns skin. Don’t touch it with your hands. If you want to make your own soap from scratch, here is the recipe. The Pioneer Thinking site lists the soap making supplies needed.

For colorful soap, you can add food coloring or non toxic children’s tempura paint powder—about 20 grams, according to one recipe online at the Home Made Soap Recipe site. You add the coloring when the soap mix reaches the heavy cream stage, according to the Web site mentioned above. Soap touches your skin and is absorbed somewhat. So I wouldn’t want to put nontoxic tempura paint powder into soap that constantly touches my skin.

Instead, use coloring only from vegetables you eat frequently, such as spinach juice, beet juice, or similar vegetables rather than commercial food colorings. Vegetables you juice and eat frequently are preferable to various synthetic food coloring dyes you buy commercially that are used in mass industrial production.

For example, a bit of turmeric turns objects yellow. Beet juice turns objects red. Spinach juice turns objects green. Would you prefer to eat hard boiled Easter eggs or green potatoes and eggs or beer for Saint Patrick’s Day or your school’s banner colors tinted green with spinach or kale juice?

Would you choose vegetable juice colorings over commercial food dyes? Can you compare the safety of one over the other?

Think about this before you make your decision as to what is more “natural” or healthier to you and your family before you decide whether to turn your cake yellow with turmeric or pour in commercial yellow food dye. Just think about it and do your own research checking out safety and health issues online or in libraries, and then you decide.

Try various colorings made from natural vegetables that are labeled safe to eat. This is not because you’re eating the soap, but because it contacts your skin and pores. Anything you put on your skin is absorbed, especially by your scalp and from the palms of your hands.

Not everyone likes scented soap. If you want a scent, such as vanilla or almond, orange or rose, you can add about two ounces (60 grams) of rose petal or orange blossom water, jasmine, vanilla, almond, or other scented essential oil or perfume before the soap is thick enough to pour.

Another way of added scent is to finish curing the soap. According to the Home Made Soap Recipe site, you can dip a muslin cloth in scented oil and wrap it around the soap. Then seal in the scent with aluminum foil.

Try making soap using rose petal water and rose petal extract scented oil. Dip a cloth in the rose petal scented oil. Then wrap the cloth tightly in plastic and keep it airtight for two months. The Home Made Soap Recipe site recommends wrapping the soap in muslin dipped in scented oil and then wrapping that in aluminum foil for six weeks. Your objective is to have the perfume sink into the soap all the way to its core and not just on the outer layer.

To change the form of the bar of soap, put the bar of soap into a plastic bag that seals tightly. Then lower the soap into hot water (120 degrees) for a half hour. That makes the soap soft enough to cut and roll into balls or press into a mold.

Make soap with your children by using favorite molds such as animal figures or oval shapes. When the soap cools, it hardens. After reshaping, let the soap rest for a few hours.

You can melt down most types of soaps, even glycerin soaps that are translucent. Any type of hard soap can be melted and remolded to a new shape. An interesting shape is to make a mold of your portrait in three dimensions, like a sculpture and give soap bars as gifts molded into the shape of someone’s face.

How to Make Mink or Coconut Oil Soap.

Your first step is to view the site titled, How to Make Mink Oil Soap. To make a basic oil-based soap, first put on your rubber, plastic, or latex gloves. You’ll be pouring lye into coconut oil.

Ingredients:

Two cups of coconut oil at room temperature.

An 8 ounce cup of mink oil.

Two ounces of lye

An 8 ounce cup of water

A non-metal bowl.

Plastic or wooden spoons.

Basic soap molds.

Plastic or enamel bowls are fine. Carefully pour the lye into the two cups of coconut oil. To make home-made soap you need two basic ingredients—lye and oil or melted fat. Stir and keep the mixture a soft liquid. Don’t let it get thick or begin to harden. 

Now add the mink oil. Stir, and now wait until it thickens. You pour the thickened mixture into your soap molds which can be of any shape. If the soap doesn’t slide out when it hardens, then store the molds in your freezer. The soap will come out when chilled.

You don’t only have to use only mink oil to make basic soap. You can make soap with any safe essential oil to use on the skin such as olive oil, rose oil, nut oils, coconut, or various scented oils safe for use on the body. For more alternatives, see the How to Make Soap site. You can make coconut-pineapple scented soaps. Or jasmine and hibiscus.

Just substitute eight ounces of any type of safe scented or unscented oil such as sweet almond oil, grape seed oil, rice bran oil, olive oil, or whatever you choose from descriptions on the Aromatherapy sites. Store your mink oil soap for at least three weeks to harden in a warm, dark pantry.

For further information, see the site on How to Make Mink Oil Soap. A list of essential oils, safety, and uses is at one or more of the numerous Aromatherapy sites. Helpful sites include: ConsumerLab.com: Evaluates the quality of dietary supplement and herbal products and  Herbal Medicine, 3rd edition. Excellent reference book.
 

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