Homemade Natural Soap Recipe – How About Making Our Own Soap?

When we talk about healthy like, of course, we don’t only mean healthy eating. We need to select every detail in healthy way and do whatever we can. Especially, we need to go healthy in cleaning materials inside our homes.

There are few things we can do at low budget. In this article, we will start with soap. Instead of buying and using soaps that we don’t know how they are made, how about making our own homemade natural soap?

Homemade Natural Soap

Actually, they often say homemade soap recipe is super easy. But, the trick is to choose correct ingredients and mix them in correct ratio. In short, when you combine right ingredients with right ratio, you can have your perfect DIY soap.

Main Ingredients for DIY Natural Soap

You need two ingredients for DIY soap. These are acidic and basic ingredients. It is hard to find some of the basic ingredients in the nature.

Especially, you can only find basic products to create reactions for soap in chemical form. At this stage, we have two chemicals. Sodium hydroxide and potassium hydroxide. Both ingredients are chemical and could be harmful if used excessively. Therefore, it is hard to find potassium hydroxide.

However, it is easy to find sodium hydroxide in all cleaning agent sellers and even in some shops. Of course, you can find sodium hydroxide in some pharmacies and chemical product sellers. Sodium hydroxide is a white powder and this powder will be used as a solution while making soap.

We need an acidic ingredient to react with basic ingredients. Here, I have my favourite oils. While making soap, we need to benefit from acidic effects of oils.

We need to use olive oil for DIY soap. Because acidity of olive oil is appropriate for oil making.

You can only use acidic and basic ingredients to make soap. But this way, you soap will be odour free. It may be good to have slight odour, softness, and herbs to benefit our skin. I am recommending coconut oil soap for your skin.

Olive oil that is popular to make soap has palmitic acid and oleic acid. When oil acid and sodium hydroxide reacts, sodium oleate (soap) and glycerol will form. We know that glycerol is common in cosmetic products due to skin softening properties. Actually, this is a reaction of an acid and base. And salts of this reaction are soap and glycerol.

Depending on mixture ratio, approximately 20% of cold process soaps are glycerine.

You should calculate sodium hydroxide amount to make soap and use accordingly. It is hard to say the exact amount. Each oil you add will change sodium hydroxide amount. Also, we don’t have sodium hydroxide in end-products. But we have sodium hydroxide that reacts with oil. Not in the final product.

By the way, you can enter your soap ingredients and calculate the amount from the following link.

www.soapcalc.net

Here are our soap ingredients:

These ingredients will form our soap. Of course, while making soap, we will use utensils for this process.

Preparation:

1. Weight all ingredients and prepare them.

2. Add water to medium steel pot. Add sodium hydroxide slowly with metal spoon. Here we have our reaction and without our reaction, we cannot have our soap.
   At this point, wear protective goggles and mix this mixture without inhaling the vapour. 

3. Add coconut oil to a pot and heat until 76 °C degrees. Use thermometer to set the heat. But make sure that thermometer doesn’t touch the bottom of the pot.

4. Add melted coconut oil to soap pot.

5. Slowly add sodium hydroxide to the same pot. Continue mixing.

6. Now with a mixer or blender, mix all ingredients at slow but consistent speed to obtain desired consistency. You need trace. You will get used to it.

7. Cover the lid of the pot and cook on lowheat. During this process, oil will collect on the sides of the pot. Mix the oil with other ingredients. This will approximately take 45 minutes – 1 hours. But cooking time may vary depending on pot temperature. Make sure to check the pot regularly.
   

8. When the soap is ready, your will have semi-transparent Vaseline look without oil accumulation.
   If you will add essential oil, wait until the mixture cools down to 40 degrees and add these oils. Otherwise, you cannot have the fragrance of these oils.

9. Pour the mixture to soap mould and let it cool. If you want to speed this up, put the moulds in the fridge.

Generally, your soup will be ready in 48 hours. But if you wait a bit longer, consistency and texture will be better.