Good Clean Fun

After talking about it, for like, months, we finally made another batch of homemade soap. This is our third go at this and we're hoping this time is the charm. The first batch turned out fine but we didn't have a proper mold so it had a weird shape, having hardened in a rubber ice cube tray that I "repurposed" by cutting the dividers out. The second batch was better than the first but it hardened around the edges and left a noticeably softer core so it looked a little off. We've read about a way to prevent that from happening this time so fingers crossed that it works! 

Cold process soap making is pretty easy, although slightly dangerous if you don't handle the lye correctly. Just follow simple safety precautions: wear thick gloves and safety glasses, have a bowl of vinegar ready to neutralize your tools, and make sure you have proper ventilation when activating the lye. You may wonder why anyone would go to the trouble of making their own soap when it can be slightly dangerous but I'll tell you why. When you mix oils and lye together and they soaponify, they create glycerin, a fantastic natural moisturizer. Well, the beauty industry wouldn't want you to be able to buy one product that would clean and moisturizer you in one so they remove the glycerin, leaving soap that dries your skin out, and then sell it to you in the form of lotion. It's a crock. Aside from that, I just like knowing what's in the products I use and I also get to choose the smell. Today's batch is called Creamsicle because we mixed vanilla and mandarin essential oils. 

We used olive, coconut, and hemp oils for the base. There are tons of different options that can be used though. 

The first step, after measuring all the ingredients, is to heat the oils on the stove and then mix the lye with water in a separate container. Lye is reactive to certain materials so it's important to not use plastic that isn't suited for high temperatures. We also avoid using metal bowls because the solution gets extremely hot, making the bowl hot to the touch. We prefer to use a very sturdy glass measuring cup.  After stirring the lye into the water, I dipped my spoon into a bowl of vinegar to neutralize the lye and looked awesome while doing it, as you can see above 😉. 

The next step is a waiting game. Both mixtures reach temperatures near 200 degrees but in order to mix them together they need to be around 115 degrees. It takes roughly  30 minutes for them to cool. 

Oil mixture

Lye and water

When they'd cooled enough, we poured the essential oils and both mixtures into an old crock from a slow cooker and used an immersion blender to achieve the "trace" stage: 

*Helpful hint: if you're going to try making cold process soap and don't have an immersion blender, buy an immersion blender. Seriously. Without one it takes approximately 5,296 hours to stir it by hand. And then your arm will fall off. It's not a fun time. 

The last step is to pour it from the crock into a mold. As you can see, it looks like a box of applesauce. It will stay there for 24 hours and can then be removed and put up somewhere out of the way to dry for the next 6 weeks. It's important to let it cure for that amount of time because if not properly cured, it is still caustic and can cause burns. We've purchased some homemade soaps that weren't quite cured long enough and it's not fun to wash your bits with soap that burns. Just sayin. 

That cup to the left is what wouldn't fit in the mold so we'll have one round bar. 

After 24 hours we removed it from the mold and chopped it into bars. With the round one we have 12 bars total. There are all kinds of ways to make them pretty, such as stamps and coloring. We may try something different in the future, but for now we're ok with imperfectly shaped bars of soap 😉. 

It will be ready October 17. I'll be sure to let Philip try it first to make sure it's cured! 😉🤣  I'll let you all know how it turns out!