How To Make A Natural Soap

If you’re going to try soap making from scratch, then why not go all the way and make your soaps all natural as well as homemade? It’s not that far a stretch, from creating your own soaps in the first place to doing it with natural ingredients, especially if one of your motivations is that you don’t entirely trust the contents or the process of commercial soap making. So making natural soap yourself just carries your intentions a step further, allowing you to trust even more the product you make.

The essential process for making natural soap, or for making any soap for that matter, is to combine a fatty acid with a base, which results in the soap itself. The base is usually soap lye, while the fatty acids are either animal or vegetable oils. For some people, animal fats raise questions about ethics and how the animals are treated, so using oils derived from vegetables, or even grains or nuts is usually preferable and feels more natural. Soap made from those oils also tends to be healthier for the skin.

Another thing that is avoided when making natural soap is preservatives, certainly the synthetic ones used in most manufacturing processes. But there are a few natural preservatives that contain strong anti-oxidants, which can help make the soap last a little longer. These are vitamin E, carrot oil and grapefruit seed extract, and they are especially valuable if you add materials such as vegetable or fruit substances to the mixture. You might use these in your soap making projects as natural coloring, using something like alfalfa or cucumber to make the soap green, carrots to make it yellow or orange, or cloves to make it brown.

When you do your soap making projects, even the extra moisturizers you add should be all natural. Things like a couple of tablespoons of hemp oil or avocado oil will do just the trick. And of course you’ll avoid adding synthetic materials to create fragrance or color to the soaps. Even if crayons are non-toxic and kid-friendly, for example, they still don’t make good dyes for this purpose. Making natural soap means just that, so every ingredient from the beginning to the end of the process should be chemical free and all natural.

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