How Is Soap Made From Scratch

Making soap is not really a complicated process. With the availability of equipments and raw materials out there, you will find it easy to do and it will enable you to personalize your bath soap that has the scent and mildness you want for your skin on your entire body.

For at least 2,000 years, humans have been using soap in order to clean themselves. Today, you will find that almost every household all over the world has bath soap.

At its most basic, soap is basically a cleansing agent made from animal fats or from salts of vegetables. This is an anionic surfactant which is used with water in order to wash and clean. Soaps come in bars or it comes in as viscous liquid.

Soap basically consists of sodium or potassium salts of fatty acids, which is normally obtained by reacting oils or fats with a strong alkaline solution.

Just how is soap made from scratch?

To make soap from scratch, you will need to have 2 basic ingredients. The first is lye, which is a strong solution of sodium or potassium hydroxide. The second ingredient is fat, which can be obtained from various oils, such as coconut oil, olive oil, shea butter, cocoa butter, and hemp oil. Depending on your preferences, you can use any type of oil you like. Keep in mind that coconut oil produces the most lather while olive oil offers the mildness in soap. Most people use a combination of palm, coconut and olive oil as it offers hardness to the soap and mildness.

Back to making soap from scratch, the method used here will be the cold process. Like the name suggests, it does not require heat in order for you to make the soap. In this method, soap is made from scratch by letting the lye react with the fats, which initiate saponification. After this method, the soap is then allowed to settle for several weeks in order to remove some of its moisture content.

After getting it settled, the next step in this particular soap making process is to purify the soap by removing the sodium choloride, the glycerol, and the sodium hydroxide. These are unwanted chemicals in the soap and you can easily remove it by boiling the soap in water and re-precipitating it by using salt. After that, you can dry the soap using vacuum dryers.

After drying the soap, you can now compact the soap to pellets and also add the fragrances of your choice. If you like, you can add bits of sand or pumice in order to give the soap a scouring quality, which is great for removing dead skin cells and promote exfoliating on the body. This will reveal healthy and live skin cells, which will make your skin glow and look healthy.

If you want your soap to have color and anti-bacterial properties, you may want to use nanoscopic metals. In most cases, people use titanium powder to get these effects. These types of soaps are extremely white. Silver, aluminum, and nickel are rarely used but they have anti-bacterial properties.

These metals have electron-rubbing behavior, which will strip electrons from the surface of the bacteria, which eventually kills the bacteria. Sometimes, the metals will remain on the skin for a long time after washing, which prevents bacterial contamination, which is perfect for getting rid of bad body odors produced by bacteria.

As you can see, making soap from scratch is really not that complicated. All you need are fats and lye and you are ready to start making your very own soap using the cold process.

There are other processes in making soaps, which can shorten the amount of time required in making soap but the cold process is very popular as this will really get you to really make soap from scratch.

Homemade soaps are great because you have absolute control on the substances or the ingredients you put in the soap. You can choose what scent you want in your soap and you can choose the property of the soap. In addition to that, you can be sure that your soap is healthy for your skin.