Natural Soap at Home
Soap making is a great thing, and it’s great to know what ingredients are going into the soap you are using on your skin. It’s good to understand that you are doing a healthy thing for your family. And there are many ways of making soap at home. You can use pre-made kits or make your soap from scratch. One of the most popular and simple recipes for making soap at home is the Castile soap recipe. It involves just using the chemical lye, water, and olive oil.
Use Pure Ingredients
For all your ingredients, you’re going to need pure ingredients and pure oil. When you get your lye, it needs to be pure lye, which is a hundred percent sodium hydroxide, and you can usually find this at a local hardware store. However, if you can’t locate it at a local hardware store, you may find it online somewhere. Your water needs to be pure, filtered and softened. You don’t want to use hard tap water because it likely contains minerals and other things that can negatively alter the soap-making process and cause it not to work.
You also need pure olive oil to make Castile soap. So if you go to the grocery store and see a bottle labeled all the oil, you still want to check on the backside for the ingredients to see whether it contains other ingredients because you are looking for pure, 100% olive oil.
Goat’s Milk Soap
Another popular soap to make is soap out of goat’s milk. So you can use evaporator goat’s milk from the can, or you can use fresh goat’s milk. Goat’s milk is popular because of its reputation for being very nourishing on the skin because of the numerous vitamins, such as vitamin E, which are essential for skin care.
And, when you are mixing the dry lye into your fresh goat’s milk and water, you may find that because of the goat’s milk, your mix is now looking quite orange. And there is no way to get around this when you are using goat’s milk. You can try putting your container on ice before adding the dry lye, but this may not remove the orange color. However, there are other ways to help change the color, and it still may be worth the benefit of having goat’s milk soap.
I should also note that making soap with goat’s milk typically takes a little more time than most other soap-making methods. And when you are making soap with goat’s milk or with just water and oil, you need to be careful with the lye, and you pour the dry lye into the water and goat’s milk and not the liquid into the lye. For mixing the lye with your water or the lye with your goat’s milk and water, you want to use a heatproof container, like a stainless steel container, to help mix the lye. Your containers should be at least two quarts.
So you would want to pour distilled or filtered, softened water into your heatproof container and then slowly and carefully add the measured and proper amount of lye, stirring carefully with a spatula to help dissolve the lye. It will get hot, and you should avoid breathing in the fumes while it is mixing. You want to mix it up quickly and carefully and then get away from it while it fumes for a couple of minutes.
Once the new lye base is mixed, you want to set it aside somewhere safe while it cools off. You then need to heat your olive oil, or whatever oil you are using, in a separate heating container to about 100 degrees F and then remove it from the heat when it reaches 100 degrees.
After that, slowly and carefully pour your lipase into the oil that has now cooled. You will keep stirring as the mix gets smoother and reaches a trace. It is not a complete process, and you will need to follow your specific measurements and recipes.
Customize your soap making process
Doing your soap-making at home can be a tremendously rewarding experience. You can feel great about it knowing that you are nourishing your skin naturally and caring for your family by knowing what ingredients you are using in your soap. You can also make the process more fun by customizing it and using oatmeal, lemongrass, or even ground coffee beans to make things more fun and interesting.
There are many ways of coloring your soap, like using natural powders such as indigo to turn your soap blue. Start with a recipe that you understand, and if you are making soap from scratch, be extremely careful with the chemicals so that you are comfortable making your soap at home. It can be a fun experience for you.
