Give Your Skin The Care It Deserves: Make Homemade Soap

Commercial soaps are nothing compared to their homemade counterparts: commercial soaps dry out your skin and often leave a disgusting film behind. Homemade soap, on the other hand, is good for your skin and uses fewer chemicals. Although it might sound intimidating, homemade soap is very easy to make, and you’ll find that homemade soaps also have none of the problems associated with commercial soaps.

One of the biggest downsides to commercial soap is that it isn’t soap at all: its detergent! This is a petroleum-based product, and will tend to dry out your skin over time, leaving you itchy and miserable. Homemade soaps, on the other hand, are made with gentle, natural oils like coconut, olive, and palm, which will both clean your skin and moisturize it.

Homemade soaps are less complicated. Rather than being made of petroleum, they’re made chiefly with water and oil. As such, they’re better for your skin and help moisturize it. Also, because you control the process of how the soap is made, not only do you have comfort in knowing for sure that it hasn’t been animal tested, but you can also choose environmentally friendly and organic materials.

Another great thing about making your own soap is that, besides controlling the ingredients, you also control all the other elements of your soap. What will it smell like? What shape will it be? What color? All of these are totally in your control, and you’re free to create the soap as you see fit. Also, because you control every part of the process, you can control what stays out as well as what goes in: you can keep out oils, perfumes, and other components that you know are harsh on your skin.

Making soap is also a great creative project, one that lets you use your imagination as you combine ingredients, fragrances, and colors. Homemade, handmade soaps also make great gifts, and it gives you a chance to learn how to make something which is essential to our lives, but which many people take for granted.

One of the easiest soap recipes uses lye, purified water, and coconut, olive, and grape seed oils. You want to make two mixtures: one of the lye and water, and the other of the three oils. The lye and water mixture will be hot and give off fumes, so set it outside to let it ventilate and cool to 110F. The oils, on the other hand, need to be heated to within 5 degrees of 110F is the closer you can get the oil temperature to the lye/water temperature, the better. Pour the lye mixture carefully into the oil mixture, then blend in a blender until its about the consistency of a thin pudding. After this, pour it into molds.

As you can see from the above soap making recipe, soap is generally easy to make, although there are some risks involved, but these can be easily mitigated with some research and general care and common sense. The riskiest part of making soap is properly handling the lye. This is a very caustic substance and the skin and eyes should be protected while working with it.

Learning to make homemade soap can be a fun, creative process that offers many benefits for you and your skin. From being healthier for you, to being more environmentally friendly, this skill and art is sure to be a satisfying pursuit.

Jen Hopkins has worked in the skin care industry for years. She maintains websites about make soap at home, and making organic soap. If you want to contact her, you can use the contact form at one of her sites.