Making your own soap can be fun and rewarding because at least you know that all the ingredients are safe, clean, and user-friendly.
Before there were commercial soaps released, everyone used to make their own soap. It is not hard, and it can be quite fun.
One of the great soap makers said that handmade soap is charming in a way that manufactured soaps could never be.
Actually, soap making is as easy and simple as buying a few ingredients from your local grocery store and mixing them together.
Just get sea salt, ground ginger, ground cinnamon, and olive oil, and mix all the ingredients together. Rub it all over damp skin and slough off the dead dry skin that rests on top. It’s that simple. I bet you thought that making your own soap was difficult and time-consuming. Well, it’s not!
Soap is the result of a rudimentary chemical reaction that takes place between fats or oils and lye. If you don’t want to make harsh lye soap, then it’s easy to add your own ingredients, and make it a lot softer and nicer. The analogy is to bread. You can make simple bread with flour and water, but it won’t taste very good. However, if you add in raisins, fruits, and sugar, then it can taste quite all right. Apply the same logic to your soap making, and you’ll be just fine.
Just combine your favorite oils, essential oils, and colorants to get the kind of soap you want.
There are four basic, and distinct, methods for making your own soap at home. You can melt and pour, use the cold process, use the hot process, or do rebatching. In the first instance, you melt pre-made blocks of soap and then add your own fragrances in. In the second method, the cold process, you make soap from scratch with just plain old simple oils and a little lye on top. In the third variation, called the hot process, you use a variation of the cold process wherein the soap is actually cooked. In rebatching, the fourth method, it is a little different. You grind up bars of soap, add milk or water, and re-blend them all over again. These four methods can produce the distinct soap that you want for your home.
Each method has advantages and disadvantages, and you might be more naturally adept at one method or the other.
